


the stars, the moon, they have all been blown out

by strongandlovestofic



Series: i believe in love and the darker it gets, the more i do [1]
Category: Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fae, Cabin Fic, Consent, Fae & Fairies, Fae Magic, Free Will, M/M, Mind-Altering Magic, Oh also, POV Third Person, Size Difference, Size Kink, Slow Burn, Snowed In, Xenophilia, also a plethora of sexual acts that i am too tired to name in detail, hokay here we go party people, i did it, i feel like i need to establish this upfront, just: some real monsterheckery, that is consensual but still occurs, uh there's just a lot of general monsterhecking in here folks, which normally isn't a big deal to tag but i did it folks, which they talk about a lot bc uhhhh faeries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-20
Updated: 2019-08-20
Packaged: 2020-09-19 00:09:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 27,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20321821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/strongandlovestofic/pseuds/strongandlovestofic
Summary: Brian's words are caught in his throat. It's a man, maybe his age, dressed in clothes that are in no way appropriate for the weather — jeans and a shirt, a plaid shirt! it's cold outside! — with dark hair and the beginnings of a beard andglasses, and that's all well and good, just a normal guy who can withstand the elements without so much as a jacket, except he's also got horns.Brian's eyes focus on them and he can't stop. They're —antlers, and maybe the guy's LARPing way out here in the middle of nowhere, but they're really well done in that case, disappearing into his hair. He's not wearing a headband or anything. They look… fuzzy."Did you eat everything?" is the first thing he asks, and his voice is a lot higher than Brian expected, for a shapeshifting LARPer.





	the stars, the moon, they have all been blown out

**Author's Note:**

> i'd like to thank forest god pat's parents, hozier and florence welch

"Okay," Brian says, and rubs his hands together. His fingers aren't — okay, they _are_ cold, they're really _very _cold but he's not thinking that because if he recognizes that his appendages are cold then he has to do something about it. Like go into the abandoned cabin he's been staring at for the last twenty minutes while pacing in a circle to keep his heart pumping.

What if it's not abandoned, is the thing. What if whoever lives there is an old Maine mountain man, out hunting moose with his elephant gun, and once Brian is settled and finally regaining feeling in his toes he storms in and shows Brian what people in these parts do to trespassers.

It's getting to the point now where Brian's going to freeze to death on this potential lawless murderer's stoop or he's going to die warm and toasty and maybe the mountain man has hot chocolate —

And Brian pushes his way through the crunchy snow and stomps his boots on the faded welcome mat that reads _DON'T,_ that's a great sign, okay, and tries the doorknob with shaking fingers.

It turns.

Brian shoves the door open and waits for the sounds of someone, maybe with a massive dog, to tell him to get gone.

When his whole body starts to shake because he's stopped moving, he squeezes his eyes shut and tells himself he's making a choice here, he is _choosing_ how he is going to die — or how he's gonna live. Maybe it's abandoned! Maybe it's —

He steps into the dark cabin and has to brush cobwebs from his chest, oh no — he ruffles his hands through his hair and hopes he doesn't have any passengers. It's hard to tell with gloves on. It's hard to tell with his fingers frozen solid.

His eyes adjust to the dark of the cabin interior and he can't immediately tell if anyone actually lives here. The cobwebs point to no, but the plaid couch seems in good repair, and there's the low hum of a fridge off in the corner.

The room is dim, but he can make out the couch and coffee table and a set of bookshelves stuffed full, a single chair pulled up to a counter separating a tiny kitchen from the rest of the room, and in the center of the room an honest-to-God potbelly stove that has a pot resting on top, pushed up against the chimney pipe.

He fumbles around for a light switch but can't find anything, and he's not going to waste his precious phone battery using it as a flashlight, so he inches into the musty darkness and keeps his ears open, listens for — anything. God, he doesn't want to get shot today.

There’s a door on the other side of the room, and when he slowly pulls it open it doesn't creak. It’s a bedroom with a double bed and more bookshelves, and a half-open door leading to what looks like a bathroom.

Brian closes the door — he's trespassing, he's crossed somebody's boundaries by coming inside at all, but he's not gonna sleep in the person's bed. He’s not gonna totally Goldilocks this person’s house.

He checks the fridge next, because it's been hours since breakfast and trudging through two feet of snow and bramble really does a number on your energy levels. It’s not empty — there’s green in the crisper and what looks like a chicken maybe, and when he checks the best by date on the carton of milk, it’s still fresh. It’s got two weeks left. Which means someone _definitely _lives here regularly, he’s _absolutely_ trespassing, and he shuts the door and leans forward, pressing his forehead against the freezer.

“Okay,” he mutters. He shuts his eyes. “Okay, so I go outside and hope someone finds me before I freeze to death or get even more lost than I already am and starve, or I. Or I stay here, and hopefully whoever comes back understands.”

Or maybe whoever owns this cabin can’t get home, because of the snowstorm. The freak snowstorm which wasn’t in the forecast, that nobody warned them about when they left the hostel for the day, headed to the ski lodge. The snowstorm that got Brian turned around when they were out on the slopes, and ended up with him in the middle of fucking nowhere Maine trying to figure out what he was going to do with bad cell reception.

It was Laura’s idea to go skiing. Brian's not _blaming_ her for this, no one could've predicted nature, but it was her idea, and him and Jonah and her fiance Erik came along for the ride, and it was fun! It'd been a great trip so far, flying into Bangor and driving their rental through the pines lining the sides of the road.

No one could have predicted this.

Which means maybe the owner of the place that's gonna keep Brian alive will be understanding.

He opens the fridge again and rustles around in the crisper, pulling out two carrots, grabs the tupperware of chicken. He staggers back towards the couch and sits down, spreading the food out on the coffee table and — he’s hit with an all-encompassing tiredness: the day catching up with him. The _fear_ catching up with him. Like finally sitting down flushed the adrenaline out of him.

God, the moment when he realized he was alone. When he checked his phone and, fuck, nothing. When he yelled for Laura, for Jonah, and heard only quiet in response. Not even birds. When he abandoned the rental helmet and skis because he was worried they'd weigh him down, make him tired faster.

He leans back on the couch, his head — shit, _ow_ — hitting the wooden frame behind the cushions, and he stares up at the dark ceiling and breathes. Breathes in, slowly. Breathes out, even slower. This could be worse. He could’ve wandered forever. He could’ve already frozen to death. Instead he’s here, with food and a roof over his head, and it's actually kind of warm.

He unties his boots and yanks them off. He slides out of the thick coat and lays it out on the couch next to him. He eats. If he focuses on basic needs he doesn't have time to panic, to come up with scenarios in which he never gets out of this cabin. Or he does, in a pine box.

"Shut _up_," he hisses around the chicken in his mouth — at least he thinks it's chicken. It's pretty gamey. Maybe rabbit? He's never had rabbit before, and he's going to keep thinking it's chicken so he doesn't imagine Thumper watching him sadly. Foghorn Leghorn doesn't have the same sway over him.

At some point, between one bite and the next, he falls asleep.

==

He wakes up when something — no, no, some_one_, it's just, they're _tall_, really, unbelievably tall — opens the cabin door and stalls just inside. He ended up lying out across the couch using his coat as a blanket and he wishes fervently that he could just sink into the cushions. Fall between them to the floor and hide. They're. They're really tall, and they're silent, and Brian invaded their space, and he doesn't know if it's better to talk, to explain, or to throw himself on their mercy, or, or —

The person heaves a sigh and they, what, oh God, did something happen when Brian was wandering the woods, does exposure make you hallucinate — because the person seems to get _smaller_, more human-sized, someone who wouldn't need to duck to get in the door anymore, and they shuffle around the entryway and the room is flooded with light. Oh. There's the lightswitch.

Any words Brian had been about to stammer out are caught in his throat. It's a man, maybe his age, dressed in clothes that are in no way appropriate for the weather — jeans and a shirt, a plaid shirt! it's cold outside! — with dark hair and the beginnings of a beard and _glasses_, and that's all well and good, just a normal guy who can withstand the elements without so much as a jacket, except he's also got horns.

Brian's eyes focus on them and he can't stop. They're — _antlers_, and maybe the guy's LARPing way out here in the middle of nowhere, but they're really well done in that case, disappearing into his hair. He's not wearing a headband or anything. They look… fuzzy.

"Did you eat everything?" is the first thing the guy says, and his voice is higher than Brian expected, for a shapeshifting LARPer.

"I — um," Brian says, and sits up. He glances at the open container of chicken. There's still some left. Not a lot. "Mostly."

The man sighs again and passes the couch, heading to the fridge. He returns with a glass of milk and a whole head of lettuce, and he sits on the end of the coffee table and — bites into the lettuce like it was a giant apple. Like that's… normal.

"Um," Brian says, and the man keeps eating, but looks up at him. "I'm — really sorry, about uh, maybe, invading your space, and uh, taking your food? But the storm hit and I, I really don't know the area, and. Anyway, my name's—"

The man drops the lettuce and lurches forward, his cool hand slamming across Brian's mouth. He looks pissed, the most emotion he's shown since he arrived.

"Don't. Don't tell me your name."

Brian swallows, and ignores the immature inner voice that tells him to lick the guy's palm. The man's hand doesn't move, and Brian — nods? Nods, and it drops, and he drags in a breath. "Okay. Sorry? Sorry for — all of this, then."

The man shrugs a shoulder and picks up the lettuce, biting into it again. That… can't be satisfying.

"It's not your fault," he says, and he takes a swig of milk. "No one controls the weather." His face twists into a wry smile after he says this, like he doesn't believe it, and Brian wants to poke at that. Acrid threads of panic are still worming through him, and there are two things he can do when he feels like this — he can let them take hold, or he can _do_ something, and doing something in this instance involves leaning forward to get a better look at the man's antlers.

"Did you make those yourself?" He doesn't try to touch them, because he's not a jerk, but the man wheels back like he did anyway, milk splashing over his hand and the lettuce crunching in his grip.

"What? Shit. _Shit_," the man snaps, and he puts the milk down and reaches up, then freezes. His shoulders slump. He drops his hand to his thigh. "Well, shit."

Which is — a weird response. Which sets Brian on edge, honestly, because now the guy's looking at him like he's reconsidering letting Brian stay on his couch, like maybe he's reconsidering being fine with Brian's being here in the first place, and Brian swallows. Doesn't look at the antlers.

"They're, um, they're very nice," he says, and the man laughs high in his throat, his shoulders shuddering.

"You can call me Pat," he says, and he shoves the remainder of the lettuce head into his mouth and stands up, milk in-hand. He stays there, looking down at Brian in the weirdest intimidation move Brian's ever seen, just chewing the lettuce until he's eaten the rest of it, his jaw moving horizontally like a — well, Brian first thought cow but with the antlers it's gotta be a _stag_, and Brian licks his lips, a nervous tic, and doesn't think he's gonna die anymore, but he's… wondering if he's gonna get to leave. Just a little nagging thought at the back of his skull.

"You, uh, you didn't want my name."

"Make something up," Pat says, before finishing his milk.

Brian says, "Jeremy," his old stand-by _I need a name_, and then frowns. He's not really a Jeremy.

Pat nods, and goes to put the glass in the sink. "Okay. You'll stay here until the storm clears." He returns to the front door and grabs a stick off of a thin table pushed up against the wall. "If you want to leave, this'll point you back here when you realize it was a dumbass thing to do."

Brian tries to think of a polite way to respond to the deer man showing him a forked stick. "Is that… a dowsing rod?"

Pat frowns, looking down at the stick and then back up at Brian. “Does the cabin look like water?”

“Touche,” Brian mutters, and then for lack of knowing what the hell else to do, he puts the lid back on the tupperware. Pat places the stick next to the door and disappears into the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. 

Brian puts the tupperware away, finds a compost bin under the sink next to a trash bin and a blue recycling bucket to get rid of the carrot tops. With the lights on, he also notices a bird’s nest built into the wide window frame above the sink. There’s shims of wood providing a base, and the nest itself is made of twigs, fitted together in a messy spiral. The center of it looks softer, pine needles and tufts of fur or — hair? maybe Pat’s hair? — forming a cup. The whole thing’s about 6 inches across, and Brian realizes that the window pane is divided into six segments, one of which has a tiny latch that sticks out a ways. When he flips it, the single segment opens and a gust of cold air blows into the cabin. There’s a latch on the other side, too.

He’s struck by the memory of when he played Puck from _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_ in college. He wore a lot of billowy fabrics and spoke in a warm drawl, and the student director insisted he read up on folklore and faeries _so he could really embrace the role_.

There were a lot of stories of faefolk turning into animals and humans, is all. Deer. Birds. People with strange affectations, who just seemed slightly off. Tales about the importance of true names, and what magic could be done with them. Warnings about how you should never —

He glances towards the fridge as his stomach sinks into his socks, and then he strides across the room, knocking on the bedroom door at an increasingly frantic beat. “Hey! Hey, oh my God, am I _trapped_ here? Did I eat your food? Is that a real thing?”

The door swings open while he’s still rapping, and he doesn’t smack Pat only because he’s startled into stillness, because Pat’s dressed down and wearing what — what may be plaid pajama pants, Brian can’t get a good look of them because Pat’s chest is _furry_. Not like, normal furry. Not_ Adam Moussa furry_ when he posts his thirst trap shots to Instagram because he likes tormenting his husband. But actually furry, like — like oh gosh, like a _deer_, patches of actual fur spread across his chest, fading in and out of skin in a way that somehow doesn’t look like a skin condition but just looks natural, all the places where a normal person would have hair.

“Um,” Brian says, and drags his eyes up from Pat’s chest to his face. Pat looks annoyed more than anything else. “Do you, uh. Am I.” Brian swallows, and takes a step back, letting his hand fall to his side. And then, because he’s a fucking imbecile, he asks, “Why do you have a beard if the rest of your body hair is fur?”

Pat brushes his hair — that! that’s hair too! why does he have hair? — away from his face, some of it catching on his antlers — which Brian can now see are connected just above his temples, that there’s _bone_ at the base there, and his skin seems to grow up around them — and maneuvers around Brian. He shuts the window segment in the kitchen and looks at the nest, like he’s checking to make sure Brian didn’t mess with it, and then he turns. He curls his hands on the edge of the counter and leans back.

Brian’s only human — and maybe the only human here — he’s had a weird day, he thought he was going to _die_ and then he passed out in a strange cabin that’s owned by some kind of handsome deer faery in plaid pajama pants.

He does not stare at Pat’s chest. Or, at least, he tries not to.

“It’s not a thing unless I want it to be,” Pat says, and it takes Brian a moment to remember what they were talking about: food and free will.

“Oh. Okay. So it — it _could _be a thing. I could be trapped here. For eternity.”

“If I wanted you to be,” Pat says simply, like that’s not an absolutely buck wild thing to tell a person, like Brian’s just supposed to be cool with magical sticks and antlers and fur and potential eternal imprisonment in, in _Maine_.

"Do you, uh. Do you want that."

Pat grimaces, and Brian tries not to feel insulted. "No," Pat bites out, in a way that makes it feel like this is a long-standing argument that Brian's not a part of, and then Pat pushes himself away from the counter and breezes past Brian and back into the bedroom.

The door shuts, and the fact that the opening chords of _Tale As Old As Time_ swell in the back of his mind are just proof that exposure probably does mess with you on a basic physiological level.

"Okay," he announces to the empty room. "Right," he says, and he intends to sit down and figure out what the heck he's going to do with the surreal situation he's found himself in, but instead he falls asleep again.

==

He wakes up to a crow's caw, followed by a quiet, stern voice. He keeps his eyes closed, breathing slowly, listening to the back and forth — because it does seem like a conversation.

"Are you jealous?" Pat asks, and there's a deep humor to his tone that crystallizes into a laugh when the crow responds. Crows usually sound irritated, but this one _really_ does.

"When the storm's over, he'll — c'mon, this wasn't my idea. It's got Dad written all over it. You know he wants me to—" Pat says, and the crow interrupts him. Pat's responding laugh is gruff, unhappy, and Brian wonders what the crow is saying, and then wonders if he hit his head while he was out wandering. The crow talking won't be the weirdest thing to happen today, if — heck, if it's still today.

He shifts as loudly as he can on the couch, stretching an arm above his head, and pushes himself upright. He finds his glasses and looks across the cabin to where Pat's sitting at the counter. Brian's plan was to give him time to... what, be normal? But Pat's sitting there, antlers and all, elbows on the formica, and there's a crow perched on the side of a bowl. They're both looking at Brian.

"This is Timothy," Pat says, gesturing to the crow, and it leans forward and snaps at his fingers.

"Oh. Hi Timothy," Brian says, and runs his hand through his hair. The bird tilts its — his? — head to the side and then caws impertinently, and Pat huffs a laugh.

"He doesn't like you," Pat interprets, and Brian's — he's embarrassed by his immediate reaction, because it's a _bird_, but that doesn't change that he's offended.

"Okay." He gets up and walks to the counter. Timothy doesn't hop away, just stares up at him, and Brian reaches past him into the bowl to grab an orange. It flaps its wings in apparent indignation and croaks at Pat furiously, and Pat shrugs a shoulder and smiles languidly up at Brian. (A clothed shoulder, Brian is happy to note. The shirt looks soft, and it's unbuttoned, and Brian _doesn't_ note that a bit of actual, honest-to-God fur is visible.)

He digs his nails into the orange peel, breathes in when the oils spritz out — he must've slept for a while, he's hungrier than he thought. "I'll leave as soon as the storm's clear." He pops two wedges into his mouth. "As long as the food's not cursed."

"Still not," Pat says, and Timothy squawks and flutters off of the bowl towards the window, where it settles into its nest in what is decidedly a_ huff_.

"Your, uh, your bird doesn't inspire confidence." Brian returns to the couch with his orange. It feels weird to hover over Pat, especially so close — it feels unnatural? Like nothing should loom over him. Like Brian’s not allowed. Which is… a weird fucking feeling.

"He's not my bird," Pat says, and Brian expects him to continue with something super granola like _he's his own bird. No one owns the creatures of the forest_, but instead he says, "He belongs to my mom. She likes to keep tabs, make sure my dad's not overstepping his bounds."

"Like making snow storms come outta nowhere?" Brian asks around a mouthful of orange, and Pat doesn't respond, reaching for his own orange instead. Brian wants to dig into that, to ask him to explain that silence, that agreement? But instead he watches in a combination of fascination and horror as Pat bites directly through the peel, tearing into it before chewing methodically.

"Dad has opinions," he says. and moves the orange slowly in his palm. "They're hit or miss. He's big on… enthralling. Thinks it suits humans."

Brian feels a spark of panic in the base of his spine at the easy way Pat says _humans. _Because this is still real somehow. Still happening. Pat still has antlers and fur and a crow he talks to about Brian. It's — unbelievable and simultaneously so mundane, this weird, handsome deer man living in the middle of the woods. It's not enough that Brian can really get a good freak out going; he's stuck in the beginning stages of panic. On the precipice of it.

"Thank you, for _not_," he says, and his chest goes tight when the weird, handsome deer man smiles at him and a squeeze of orange juice slides out of the corner of his mouth, and he licks it up.

Brian finishes his orange, and composts the peel. Timothy snaps at him from above the sink.

==

Brian apparently slept through the night, and Pat tells him he has to go out and check on things — his morning routine.

"Make sure the woods are where you left them?" Brian asks, and Pat pauses in the doorway.

"Trees move when they're restless," he says, as Timothy settles on his shoulder. "They're assholes."

And before the door has closed behind him Brian catches a glimpse of him _shifting_, becoming the tall thing he was that first day, too tall to clear the lintel.

He throws open the door to try and really see him, but there's nothing there — not even footsteps or tracks in the snow. Like he never existed. Like Brian imagined him… which is not a route Brian’s willing to go down right now. He investigates the cabin instead: it feels less like an invasion, now that the owner knows he’s here.

Pat has a collection of books on horticulture and arbology, cover-to-cover in a bookshelf along the wall. Brian feels like if you're some kind of steward of the forest that kind of thing should come naturally, but then he finds a diploma shoved between old copies of _National Geographic_: Pat went to UMaine. He studied Ecology and Environmental Science and minored in New Media, and the name he went by was Patrick Gill. Brian can't imagine it's his real name, given — everything. (He's bought into it. He believes it. Oh gees.)

When he slides the diploma back a photo falls out from behind the thick paper — Pat without the antlers, looking incredibly human, so normal, his arm around a much smaller woman, both of them with wide smiles on their faces, their mortar board tassels in their eyes. It's — personal, Brian realizes, and he hides it back away and returns the diploma to the shelf, and grabs a book on diseases of the bark of deciduous trees, which he had no idea you could write a whole book on.

He reads it for about ten minutes before giving up. He's not writing a paper on it, or making a video about how bark diseases really come through in the animations of the Last of Us, and the moment he thinks about his job he thinks about Laura and Jonah and how he's been missing for a whole day, and he feels his stomach drop out.

_God,_ he’s been missing for a day. They’re probably back at the hostel worried out of their minds. They’ve probably told Mom. What if there’s a search going on for him? _Missing: skier last seen wearing bright red snow jacket and black pants. Got lost because he’s a city boy and doesn’t know anything about what you’re supposed to do during a white-out._

He finds a supply of peanut butter chocolate chip protein bars in one of the kitchen cabinets — and resolutely doesn’t think about how that’s kind of charming, a godlike deer man with a sweet tooth — and shoves them into his coat pocket. He suits back up and when he throws open the door he’s buffeted by a blast of freezing February air. He glances back behind him, considering, and… the thing is, he doesn’t get reception here. He’s got 45% charge left on his phone, which is fine if you’re out for a quick jaunt and will be home within a few hours, but less fine if you’re waiting for a snow storm to get its act together and you don’t think you’ll be able to charge it for another few days, at least.

If he can just get somewhere that he can get a text through, let them know he’s okay. That’s worth it, right? He can reassure them he’ll be back once the weather’s settled.

He grabs the stick — the _dowsing rod_, it _is_, whatever Pat says — and takes a deep breath and heads out into the snow.

==

The dowsing rod is just a stick until he holds it in his hands and thinks, _I need to get back to the cabin_. It nudges him to his right, a strange pressure against the inside of his palm where he’s grasping it, until finally it lets up.

So that’s how that works.

He stops thinking about the cabin and keeps walking, struggling through the snow on the ground and the snow falling into his face, checking his reception every few minutes until he realizes — _maybe_.

He grabs the rod again and concentrates. _I need to find a place I can get through to text my sister_.

The rod directs him to the nearest tree, and then slowly lifts up once he’s at the base of it. Which, fine. Magic has a sense of humor. Or it’s startlingly literal.

_I need to find a place that isn’t something I need to climb where I can get through to text my sister_.

And it swerves him around in a direction he hasn’t gone yet. Maybe it’s leading him to a patch of clear weather. To a field, absent of trees. To a mountain that has a steady trail up, that he can manage without hurting himself. And then once he’s found it he can tell Laura he’s okay, that he’s waiting out the storm in a cabin, and then he can return to the cabin and warm up by the potbelly stove, prop his boots next to it so they dry out. He can eat more of the probably-chicken-but-maybe-rabbit, and wait for Pat to finish his rounds. Maybe Pat has a deck of cards and they can play something. Maybe he has books that aren’t related to forestry and animal husbandry. Maybe he’ll walk around with his shirt off.

_Nope_, Brian thinks, and redirects himself to paying attention to his surroundings. The snow’s not falling too hard right now, but it’s still coming down; his legs are already feeling the strain of stomping through the what, two feet already on the forest floor? He’s never lived anywhere that got snow like this, not regularly. It’s pretty — really gorgeous, if you’re just looking at it. The slogging he did yesterday and his current adventure are putting a damper on that though.

Snow stops being beautiful when it’s such a hindrance. When it’s _so cold_. When you’ve been out in it for an hour and a half and your feet feel like iceblocks.

He takes another step forward and the rod does a strange lurching motion, pushing his hands in towards his chest gently, and he stops. Scrambles for his phone and awkwardly wakes the screen with a fat, gloved finger. “Oh my God,” he huffs out, because there’s two bars — and he doesn’t know how signals work or why this spot works and why others don’t but he’s not going to question it. He drops the rod and pulls his glove off with his teeth and unlocks his phone, fumbles with it with cold fingers, ignores the number of missed calls he’s received and scrolls down through the texts Laura’s sent him — he can’t read them now, he’ll read them later, he has to capitalize on this:

_>I’m okay_  
>_Bad reception so this might be all you get from me_  
>_I love you and tell mom I’m not dead please_  
>_Got lost but found a cabin and the guy living there’s letting me stay_  
>_He seems like not a serial killer_

Almost instantly Laura starts to reply, God, has she just been waiting by her phone? Has she slept? Has she been worried sick?

_>BRIAN_  
>_Where are you?_  
>_Oh gosh I love you I’m so glad you’re okay please don’t be axe murdered or get frostbite_

And as Brian’s staring at his phone, his hand shaking, he watches it lose reception. Whatever blip of the weather and geography that allowed him to text her is gone now, and he breathes out in a rush. Has to wait out the urge to chuck his phone into the snow. Has to focus on — on something that isn’t the tumult of feelings pummeling his chest. The cold biting his nose, his fingers. That at least Laura knows now. That she won’t worry… as much.

He slides his phone into his pocket and puts his glove back on, and he picks up the rod. “Thanks,” he tells it, because — you should be polite, right, to magical items, in case they decide they don’t want to help you anymore. “I’d like to, uh, I’d like to go back to the cabin now.”

He eats his last protein bar. It’s slow-going, the snow really starting to come down since he started trudging back, and he’s grateful he doesn’t need visibility for the rod to work. Doesn’t mean it’s not freaky not being able to see trees in front of him, until he’s a foot away from them. He grabs handfuls of snow to let melt in his mouth every once in a while, and he starts thanking the rod more regularly, like that’ll somehow get him to the cabin faster. His feet… they aren’t starting to burn, he knows that’s bad, but they’re heavy in his boots, and he keeps rubbing his nose. God, he should’ve grabbed a scarf. Does Pat own scarves? Does he need a scarf or does he just — generate heat? Maybe his eight foot tall deersona has no trouble with the cold.

Brian rubs his sleeve against his leaking nose and thanks the rod again, and then freezes, a rustle several feet above him catching his notice. Taking him by surprise. He’s not run into any wildlife, everything except _him_ too smart to be out in this weather, and it’s not like whatever made that noise could be all that big, but it still startles him. Startles him worse when the crow lands on the end of the rod and Brian yelps, dropping it. The crow croaks at him and settles on the ground, picking at the rod, and Brian feels a bone-deep sense of horror hit him as it grabs one end of the rod and starts to flap its wings.

“No.” He lunges forward but the bird moves with preternatural speed — or God, maybe that’s just how fast crows move, Brian wouldn’t know — and flies up and away, the rod in its bastardy little beak. “No!” Brian screams, and because, because it only makes sense, because it _makes sense somehow_, “Timothy, you stupid — bring it back! _Timothy!_”

Timothy does not bring it back.

Brian stands in the middle of the snow storm, next to a tree, and tries not to start hyperventilating.

He found the cabin. Yesterday, he got lost and he found the cabin, and he didn’t panic. He didn’t panic when a giant showed up, or when the giant revealed itself as a probable faery named _Patrick Gill_, or when Pat talked about enthrallment. He didn’t panic when he thought about his family, or when he put his faith in a dowsing rod and it worked.

He’s not going to panic now. He’s — he’s in the forest, and he was headed back to the cabin, and Pat may not be a serial killer but it’s pretty clear now that there’s a crow that lives with him that has aspirations to start, and if Brian keeps going straight maybe it’ll be fine. Maybe he’ll get back to the cabin. Maybe he won’t get turned around in this near white-out. Maybe he won’t die from exposure. He can’t very well die of dehydration: there’s snow everywhere. He can eat bark, probably.

Oh God, the trees are assholes though. They might not like him stripping their bark off. _They_ might get cold.

He props his hand against the nearest tree and leans against it. “Sorry,” he tells it, in case it doesn’t like that, and the word comes out hiccup-y and wet, and a little shaky. “Sorry, if you don’t like people too. You’re probably all the way out here in the middle of nowhere because you don’t like people, huh.”

The tree doesn’t say anything. Brian wonders if Pat can talk to the trees, or if it’s more of a _feeling_. Or if maybe trees don’t emote at all, and they just move around like aimless amoeba. “Sorry,” Brian says again, in case trees are telepathic instead. “You seem very wise,” he adds, because trees have always struck him as wise. Old and slow-moving and thoughtful. “Pat says you’re assholes but I bet you’re great,” he adds, and then turns his face against his arm and beats his forehead there, once, because _yeah_, sure, good one. Smooth.

The tree doesn’t reply. It’s a tree.

“Okay,” Brian says, and pushes himself upright. “Okay, the rod wanted me to go — that way.” He thinks. Fuck. “So. Okay.”

He treks forward, because his alternative is staying still next to the tree he just insulted, and that seems foolhardy. Slightly more foolhardy than trying to find his way through the snow streaking down from the sky, at least.

He doesn’t know how long he walks. He’s afraid to check the time on his phone — afraid to find out that it took him an hour and a half to find reception, and that it’s been two or more hours since. That he’s definitely off the trail. That he’s going to die because a bird was maybe jealous of him, somehow. What the fuck would a bird be jealous of? It’s a _bird_. It can _fly_!

He stops between two trees and leans his head back. “You can fly, you motherfucker!” he shouts, and he doesn’t stomp his feet but it’s close. He feels like stomping his feet. He feels like hitting something. He feels like falling backwards into a snowdrift and letting the snow take him. Return to nature. Maybe Timothy’s just a zealous environmentalist, taking out humans one at a time to save Mother Earth. Maybe Pat’s mom is Mother Earth. Maybe Timothy’s just doing what he’s been tasked with.

He has to sit down, eventually. He doesn’t want to, not really — stopping moving seems bad. It seems cold, and it _is_, the chill settling even deeper into his bones as soon as he slumps onto a fallen trunk, but he’s exhausted. It’s been hours. It’s been _hours_, and he’s not going to find the cabin.

He picks up a pine cone and chucks it at the tree a few feet in front of him. A bit of snow falls off the trunk, exposing the bark, and he tips his head forward, closing his eyes. “Hey, tree. Sorry for hitting you. Kind of, uh, kind of feeling lost right now. I _am_ lost right now. D’you know Pat? Tall guy, antlers, quiet, has a crow who’s an absolute shithead. Could you tell him I’m here, maybe?”

The tree is a tree.

“You can — move, right? Maybe you can talk too. Maybe you’ve got connections through your roots to all the other trees and you can send messages.” He thinks he read a book like that once. Maybe the author was right. “Can you tell Pat I’m here? Please? I’d… I’d really appreciate that, tree.”

He scrubs his face with his gloves, upsetting his glasses, and curses under his breath when he takes his hands away and they’re all smeared.

“I’ll even learn what your name is, okay? The scientific one, you don’t need to tell me your real name. My real name’s Brian, if you want to use that for your tree magic. Not even Pat knows that, so you’ve got a leg up on the forest god, congratulations.” He shoves his glasses into his pocket next to his phone, and hunkers down. “I bet your name’s in one of Pat’s books. If you tell him.”

==

Brian wakes up when something grabs him around the waist and hefts him up like he’s completely weightless, and the best he can do is mutter, _watch m’glasses_, _‘n m’pocket._ He turns his face into soft warmth and starts to shiver.

==

He feels fine, when he wakes. Fine, like he just fell asleep on the couch again, like he didn't push himself too hard and then gave up and begged a tree for help.

He sits up and finds Pat, standing over the stove, stirring something that smells — incredible. Onion-y.

"How," he says, and he clears his throat. He wiggles his fingers and his toes. He's wearing different clothes, not his own, so that's. That happened at some point. "How much magic do you have?"

Pat hums but doesn't turn around. He reaches for something, adding it to the pot.

"The tree who told you about me," Brian says, slumping back onto the couch. "What kind is it?"

Pat laughs, gently. "You think trees can talk?"

"Yeah," Brian says, blinking up at the ceiling. He really does feel fine. He… doesn't think he should, all things considered. He was out there for a while, and even if nothing permanent happened, he should be sore. He should ache after hours of walking through knee-deep snow. "I told it I’d learn its name. Out of gratitude."

Pat is quiet, and then he's towering over the end of the couch, holding a bowl and a spoon. “I made you soup but I’m a shitty cook.”

“Oh.” Brian sits up and takes the bowl from him — not hot enough that he can’t grab it — and the spoon, and twists so he’s against the back of the couch. “That was… um, nice of you. Thanks. What is it?”

“Rabbit,” Pat says, and then with a twist of a smile Brian only catches out of the corner of his eye as he takes a bite, “Thumper.”

“Oh my God,” Brian says, spoon spilling out of his mouth as he laughs, “I’m trying to _eat_.”

Pat hums and then returns with his own bowl, and he sits on the coffee table and takes his own bite. “Trying to eat Thumper.”

The soup’s pretty good, actually. The broth could use something, it’s a little bit too much like vegetable water — but it’s still pretty good. Anything would probably taste good given how empty his stomach suddenly feels though. “That’s not a thing. Every — every beast and creature doesn’t have a name, especially not, not after a Disney character.”

“What’s the name of the tree, Pat,” Pat parrots, and Brian fishmouths at him for a second. Not just because he’s got jokes, or at least _teasing_, but because he — he actually sounded like.

“What,” Pat says, dropping his spoon into his bowl and narrowing his eyes.

“Can you… how much magic do you have?” Brian asks again. “You sounded like me. It was like, it was like my voice coming out of your mouth.”

Brian’s not imagining the red creeping down from Pat’s temples, from his _antlers_, the blush spreading slowly across his skin. When he’s all deered-out does he blush? Is any of his skin visible? Does he wear clothes or do they disappear like he was an Animagus?

“It’s just mimicry,” Pat finally says, blinking rapidly and looking down at his soup, “not a lot of, uh, not a lot of skill involved. Timothy can even do it, like, when he wants to.”

Brian almost bites down on his spoon. “Timothy tried to _kill me_!” he says, and Pat — laughs, though it sounds rueful. “That was him, right? Did he bring the rod back? Is that how you found me — he told you he’d stolen it and, and left me to die?”

“Timothy’s probably with my mother.” Pat drinks the rest of his soup — he’d been picking out all the solid bits, apparently, and now he slurps the broth down. “You won’t be able to leave now, without me. It wouldn’t be safe for you—” As soon as he says it his hands tighten around the bowl, and he heaves a great sigh and drops his head down between his shoulders, the bowl tipping enough that the dregs of the broth start to drip onto the hardwood floor.

“Uh.” Brian puts his own bowl down on the coffee table and reaches for Pat’s, easily taking it from his loose grip. He looks at it for a moment, while he chooses his words. While he works through his dear old friend panic. He stands up and takes Pat’s bowl to the sink, and because he hasn’t seen a dishwasher yet he starts washing it. That’s something to do with his hands. Something to occupy his time. The least he can do, living in a guy’s cabin and eating his food and getting rescued by him multiple times. It gives him the space, too, to ask, “Does your mom have the same ideas about enthrallment as your dad?”

He looks over his shoulder when Pat stays silent, and Pat’s sitting on the coffee table staring down at his hands — and it’s like he feels Brian’s gaze on him because his head whips up like. Like a deer in headlights, quick and startled, his lips just open.

“Sorry, I,” Brian says, and turns back to the sink. He doesn’t know why he’s apologizing. For putting that look on Pat’s face? For surprising him by asking such a reasonable question? (Can a question about enthrallment be reasonable?) It’s more than obvious Pat’s not used to people in his space, so maybe he’s just not used to that. To people. To... person. A human. “This has been a really fucking weird couple of days.”

“You aren’t afraid of me,” Pat says instead of a normal response to that statement, like, _I agree_, or even, _This is a normal Thursday for me, actually_.

Brian rinses the bowl and sets it upside down, lip hanging over the edge of the sink so it can dry. He wipes his hands on the front of his… well, Pat’s pajama pants, and turns, leaning back against the counter. Pat’s still watching him, his expression a strange kind of vulnerable that Brian thinks should answer Pat’s question for him.

“You kind of saved my bacon, man,” he says, and Pat’s already shaking his head.

“You have no idea what I am.” Pat stands and — he stalks forward, is the thing, his shoulders curled, his head still low. He seems taller. He’s — oh, he’s definitely taller. He’s gotten taller. The hunching is maybe so his antlers don’t start scraping the ceiling. If Brian stares straight ahead his eyes are barely at Pat’s chest, and Brian grabs onto the countertop edge and he swallows and he forces himself to look up. And up, seems like, to meet Pat’s darkened eyes. To find his eyes in the sudden depth of his face, as though the light in the room has receded, as though dusk affected electricity. There’s fur sprouting across his skin, and his pupils are — weird. Not wrong, but…

“Do you have goat eyes?” he asks, because that’s the first thing that comes to mind.

Pat blinks down at him. “What?” His voice is deep, much deeper than how he usually sounds, but maybe this is how he usually sounds. Maybe when he’s three feet taller his vocal cords are just that much longer, and that’s just science, right, longer equals lower, Brian’s never considered the acoustics of shapeshifting before.

“Your, your pupils. Like a goat’s, I think,” Brian says, because once he has an idea he sticks with it, regardless of how stupid it is, and it’s stupid, it’s definitely stupid, he should be terrified right now and he is, kind of, but he’s also _fascinated_, and fascination combined with panic equals whatever the hell he’s doing right now. “Do you have to hold your other form? Or do you have to hold this one? Which one’s more comfortable?”

“Neither, once I’m settled it doesn’t — you aren’t _afraid of me_,” Pat says, and he sounds insulted? Or different layers of surprised, like this is the first time someone hasn’t taken him as seriously as his presence demands. Which Brian would feel bad about but also, the last few days have, again, been _really weird_, and Brian’s already made peace with that mostly. A shapeshifting host with goat eyes —

“No, sorry, _deer_ eyes, they’re horizontal of course, wow, sorry. I think. Or, oh gees, maybe they’re both horizontal?”

— doesn’t break the top 5. Timothy holds the first 3 slots on his own. That motherfucker.

And then there’s a hand, almost-a-hand, Brian can’t see it, sliding up under his chin and taking hold, two large fingers holding his face firmly, and he draws in a breath and freezes, feels. Feels not fear but. But something in the neighborhood of it. Because Pat wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of rescuing him from the snow if he was going to throttle him in the kitchen. Think of the mess he’d have to clean up. He’s not a brownie, he doesn’t have cleaning magic. Probably. But it’s still — intimidating. To have someone three feet taller than you holding you in a grip you know without a doubt you can’t break.

“You’re so fucking weird,” Pat says, and he huffs out a heavy breath through his nose, and it seems even darker in the room now, dark enough that Brian can’t see the shape of Pat’s face, but he feels his exhale, close. Like Pat has — a snout, maybe. “Humans are afraid. That’s their basest emotion. What’s left, after you strip everything else away.”

His voice reverberates through his hold on Brian’s chin, down into Brian’s bones, and Brian licks his lips. Forces himself to breathe. To not cave in to the fear he knows is there, lingering on the periphery. He’s got a point to make now. Because Pat’s not necessarily wrong — Brian’s lived with people too, but Pat’s also got a skewed perspective if he responds to things that confuse him like this. “Yeah, so there’s enthrallment, right. To account for that. To strip everything anyway. And did you ever, did you ever put together that if you take away somebody’s ability to choose they’re gonna stay afraid of you forever? Even once they get it back.” Pat’s grip tightens, and Brian can’t tell if it’s a warning or a reaction. “So maybe your parents just suck.”

Pat tips his head to the side, and Brian can only tell because his antlers shift, he either has no neck or he has — roughage? moss? massive shoulders? — so it's hard to see otherwise in the dark, and he releases Brian's chin and shuffles back. Light begins to filter back into the room. Pat is… smaller. More human-shaped. It’s a disconcerting thing to watch, like one of those time-lapse videos of a decaying animal but in silhouette.

"Sorry," Pat says, his voice an unsettling blend of timbres, and Brian’s hands start to relax from where they were clawed into the countertop edge. “I’ve never,” he says, and shakes his head. Something dark and spindling out from him moves independently of his head and body, rustles around his neck — moss, then, maybe. Old growth. “Humans like the… ha, the familiar. When that changes…”

Brian thinks of the photograph hidden away in the diploma. Maybe Pat has a sister, but they didn’t look related. So maybe she was just… important. Maybe she found out. Maybe he told her. Maybe she was afraid. Which is — reasonable, honestly. Which makes perfect sense, because Pat can be nine feet tall and five hundred pounds and has a grip that could break steel, and his family thinks forcing a person into staying against their will is fine, ethically.

He also lives in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. That’s a lifestyle choice not everybody’s up to.

But Brian’s almost died twice in the last 24 hours — and yeah, he keeps thinking this, and he keeps using it as a baseline, neither of which is _great_, but this is where he is right now. His baseline’s all fucked up. And Pat doesn’t seem dangerous, he just seems… it feels inappropriate to call a potentially-ageless faery with an undergraduate degree naive. He’s just once bitten, twice shy.

Acknowledging that doesn’t change the way Brian’s hands are shaking.

He swallows, and glances toward the bedroom door. “Can I use your bathroom?”

Pat’s nearly his normal size, or at least the size Brian’s used to. The cabin’s bright again, well-lit, and when Pat rolls his shoulders back Brian watches the fur peeking over his collar shift from dark to tawny, then recede back under his clothes. “Yeah, sure, just through the door.”

Brian nods and — he walks briskly, okay, he doesn’t run. He glances back at Pat just inside the doorway, and Pat’s watching him.

“White pine. It was a white pine,” he says, and Brian pauses enough to process that, to nod again.

“Oh. Thanks.”

“_Pinus strobus_,” Pat adds, and then with a slight quirk to his mouth, “Most of the trees out here are white pine.”

Brian’s hand finds the doorknob and he squeezes it. Curls his other hand slowly in and out of a fist. They’re still shaking, just a little, the adrenaline working its way through his body. “But it was that tree, wasn’t it.”

Pat ducks his head, huffing a laugh. “Yeah.”

Brian nods and — lets go of the doorknob, and doesn’t pay attention to anything in the bedroom on his way to the bathroom. He shuts that door behind him. Locks it. Lets the adrenaline fully hit him until his whole body’s shaking, until the rabbit part of his brain tells him that was _fucking terrifying_; and until confusingly, mortifyingly, his internal wiring all wrong, the lingeringly adolescent part of his brain tells him it was _kind of hot_, and his body wars between deciding if it wants to puke or get a hard-on.

He sits on the closed toilet and forces himself to breathe instead of doing either of those things.

He upsets his glasses by pushing his palms into his eye sockets, and he stretches his fingers back to shove into his ears, and he breathes.

He thinks about the sound of Pat's laugh, and the twist of his smile. About the shape of him, human but not, and then anything _but_ human. About the mannerisms that wouldn't have necessarily gotten him cast out from any social group but would've gotten him branded as a weirdo, and about how if he ages like everybody else then he's been living out in the woods with nothing but a bastard bird and nature to keep him company for a decade.

It's not an excuse, but Brian isn't sure he needs to excuse anything. Which — is maybe not good. But it sits in his gut fine. And he tries to trusts his gut.

He isn't sure how long he stays like that, but apparently it's long enough that Pat knocks on the door. "I'll never force you to do anything you don't want to do. I promise you," he says, quietly, and walks away.

It's reassuring. It should be reassuring.

It's just that Brian's starting to worry about what it is, exactly, that he wants to do.

==

Pat's out in the main room of the cabin when Brian finally settles enough to leave the bathroom, and Brian hesitates just enough to say he did before starting to snoop around the bedroom. Light spills through the door, and Brian bites back a laugh with he realizes Pat's bed linens are all plaid. Guy's got a thing. An aesthetic.

There are more books, less forestry, more high fantasy. A Jackie Chan autobiography. There's a coffee table book of wrestling photography that Brian pulls out and flips through — lots of sweaty men flexing at each other.

He follows a cord from the outlet to the side of the bookshelf and, popping open one of those magnetized cabinet doors, finds a TV and an honest-to-God PS4.

He sticks his head out the door. Pat's scrubbing down the countertop. It's already clean, and Brian praises himself for the no-brownie-magic assumption and also wonders for a split second if he anxious-cleans before asking, "You play video games?"

Pat squeezes the cloth and too much water drips onto the counter. "Uh, yeah. Selection’s not great and there's no internet, but… yeah, why?"

"Do you have any co-op?"

Pat mops up the extra water. "The second controller's beaten to shit." But he tosses the cloth in the sink and joins Brian in the bedroom, and that's how Brian ends up sitting on the end of Pat's bed playing Diablo III, Pat taking one for the team with the controller he says _Timothy got to_.

Brian's never played but it's not hard to learn — it's a lot of button spamming — and during one of the lulls while Pat fixes his loadout, he leans back on his hands. Looks at Pat in profile.

"How do you get power out here?"

Pat frowns at the TV and scraps a legendary ax. "There's a generator."

"Gas?" Which seems environmentally unfriendly for a deer man devoted to protecting the woods.

“No.” He closes out of the loadout screen. “A generator.” He pauses the game and stands up, and Brian feels like he’s missing out on an integral part of this conversation until Pat says, “D’you wanna see it?” and heads for the front door.

When Brian gets outside, his coat unzipped and his boots untied but on, Pat’s twenty feet from the cabin, laying a palm against one of the pines and — talking to it, Brian thinks, murmuring something. Brian joins him and Pat steps back, grabbing at a chunk of bark and, huh, lifting it off hooks emerging from the trunk. He sets the bark down and there’s this… _thing_, embedded in the tree at chest height. It looks like a beetle carapace, caramel-colored and shiny, and as Brian stares at it Pat reaches forward and runs a finger down what appears to be the break between the beetle’s wings and they, oh, they flutter.

“I don’t,” Brian says, and then Pat turns to him and smiles, a full smile, the first time Brian’s seen it, he has _dimples_, oh — and it doesn’t do anything as dramatic as transform his whole face (not as much as turning into a giant deer person does, anyway), but it does make him look… softer. He has a kind smile... Uh, and he has. Uh. He’s got good teeth.

Brian looks back at the beetle. His ears are burning because it’s cold.

“I don’t understand,” he finally manages to get out in its entirety, and Pat chuckles.

"It feeds on the life of the forest," he says, and gently raps a knuckle against the carapace, "but it functions as part of my agreement with them. It takes what's freely given, and never too much. Trees deserve that kindness."

"And it — generates."

"It shits out energy," Pat says, clearly delighted, and he turns that stupid megawatt smile on Brian again, who thinks he's smiling back, "in uh, a manner of speaking, into the — I really hate how this sounds, into the aura of the clearing. I can shape it then."

Pat grimaces when he says it, and Brian's — charmed. That's really charming. "Are you embarrassed by the wonders of magic, Pat?"

"There's no good way to describe it without sounding cheesy," he grumbles. "There's no good English for _aura_ that doesn't sound like I'm trying to sell you essential oils."

"What language has a good word for it?" Brian asks, and with a quick glance at Pat, reaches forward. Pat doesn't seem bothered, so Brian touches the beetle carapace. The thing shifts under his hand, like it wasn't expecting the touch — like it's not used to a _human_ touch — but settles after a few seconds. It's warm, like a heating pad, and Brian feels emboldened to lay his palm flat against it. It feels… really nice. (That's his creative writing degree at work right there.) It feels like wrapping yourself in a blanket and sipping on a mug of broth.

"Gaelic. Welsh. Manx," Pat says. "The stereotypical answers."

"Can you speak all of those?" Brian rubs his thumb over the top of the carapace, where he thinks the beetle's head might be, and thinks _thanks for all you do_ at it before taking a step back.

Pat replaces the bark shell and brushes his hands off on the front of his jeans. "Nah," he says, "never got taught," and he turns back to the cabin. "I can understand Gaelic most of the time though. I watched a lot of Irish television as a kid."

The cogs in Brian's brain whir. "So you're not much older than me."

Pat huffs, holding the door open for him. "How old're you?"

Brian goes in and drops his boots next to the couch, his coat over the back. "Twenty-five. Grew up in Baltimore — well, just outside. I live in New York now, I've got a pretty sweet gig."

"Living in a crowded city with too many people and not enough trees?"

"There are trees! Have you been to Central Park?"

Pat snorts, moving into the kitchen and grabbing a carrot from the fridge. There is no way to eat a carrot weird, Brian thinks, and Pat proves him right by just eating it like a normal person. "Don't worry, people of New York: we've isolated nature to a park. You don't have to worry about greenery as long as you steer clear."

"You're biased," Brian grouses, and heads back into Pat's bedroom. They left the PS4 on, and he picks up his remote and unpauses the game. "Get in here and fight demonspawn with me."

Pat joins him, carrot dangling from his lips like a cigar. They fight a lot of demonspawn.

"I'm 32," Pat says during a loading screen, and Brian has to reorient Pat in his mind: a _baby_ deer man, new to the whole forest god thing. No wonder he went to college. Had to learn as much as he could before being tasked with maintaining a whole ecosystem.

"See, you've got centuries ahead of you to enthrall some manservants," he says, and Pat chokes laughing on his last bit of carrot.

==

The sound of Brian's phone alarm wakes him. He's a whole lot comfier than he has been every other time he's woken up, and when he opens his eyes he realizes it's because he's in Pat's bed. Oh. Well. That's… fine.

His phone's in his coat pocket, and he rolls onto his back and contemplates getting up. Maybe Pat will turn it off. He's probably awake, puttering around thinking about squirrels.

Pat does not turn it off.

Brian doesn't even hear him in the other room, so he heaves a sigh and starts to swing his legs over the side of the bed and — freezes. Because his toes are within inches of Pat's sleeping form, curled up on the floor next to the bed.

Pat's an anxious sleeper, seems like. His forehead is all wrinkled, his lips curved down, and every once in a while his whole face grimaces. Brian lays back on the bed and… just looks down at him. However his magic works, he doesn't need to consciously maintain it. He's still a deer man when he sleeps, and he's got a good pillow under his head so his antlers don't bump into the floor. He'd pulled another comforter from somewhere and it's slid down to his waist sometime during the night, revealing a whole Goddamn expanse of pale skin and tawny fur. He must not get cold easily. His shoulders are fuzzy. He looks _soft_.

Brian's phone snoozes itself.

He keeps looking down at Pat.

Pat could've slept on the couch. He could've told _Brian_ to sleep on the couch.

He grimaces again, his features tensing before returning to… he looks unhappy when he sleeps.

Brian reaches out and smooths out the lines of his forehead — draws his thumb gently over cool skin. His fingers brush against Pat's hair, and he, gosh, he holds his breath. If he moves his hand an inch to the right he could touch one of Pat's antlers, feel where it connects.

The only time Brian's touched antlers was when they got a set for their dog when he was a kid. Which seems kind of morbid now.

Pat's eyes open.

Brian tenses, his hand jolting away from Pat's face, but Pat doesn't say anything. He doesn't get up. He does move, but just enough that it's obvious he's closing the gap Brian put between him and Brian's hand, and it's not like that time a goat headbutted Brian's hand until he petted him at a fair when he was little but it's not _not_ like that.

Pat's eyes drift shut, his lashes fluttering, when Brian uses his nails against his scalp. They stay shut when Brian's fingers touch the root of one of his antlers, and Brian doesn't want to be weird about this but they're — really fucking cool, is the thing. Velvety soft, and Brian's hand stutters when some of that velvet shreds under his touch but Pat makes a noise like, like pleasure so maybe that's okay.

He curls his hand around the antler, around Pat, and — wonders at the weight of it, at how when Pat changed, his antlers stayed the same. He can hide them, the college photo showed that, but it must be more comfortable for him to keep them out, if he does around the cabin. 

"Do they shed?" Brian wants to curse himself for breaking the silence, but curiosity will forever be his downfall, and it doesn't seem to bother Pat, whose eyes blink open lazily.

"Mmmno," he says, and he stretches out his legs, kicking at the blanket. "Deer shed their antlers due to testosterone drop. Usually happens after does have gone into estrus, after the stags stop picking fights with each other." A slow smile spreads over his face, loosening his features but making something twist inside of Brian. "Also I'm not a deer."

"You sure about that? I've seen your eyes," Brian says, and hooks a nail in a bit of velvet, works his fingers underneath until he can feel honeycomb bone beneath his knuckles. "And your velvet's coming off."

Pat moves sleepily, slowly enough Brian could pull away if he wanted to, but Pat takes Brian by the wrist and sits, holds onto him while he pushes himself up until he's seated on the side of the mattress next to Brian — bends Brian's arm back, his wrist just above his head, Pat leaning over him.

Brian's mouth is dry. Pat's hand on him is cool, almost clammy but not unpleasant — a point of distinction when the rest of him is so warm under the covers. Pat's eyes are searching, and even when they look like human eyes Brian feels like he's staring up at something foreign. Something that's letting him this close.

"Do you think you're unique?" he asks, and Brian swallows.

He's not sure how to take that question. It has the feel of an insult, but Pat sounds honest. Like he's still trying to sort Brian out. Like he's still wondering why Brian isn't always scared.

"Sometimes," Brian says truthfully, "about some things." Pat's hair is falling in his eyes, and Brian can't stop thinking about how soft it was to touch. "But when you're one in like, seven billion, it's hard to know for sure."

Pat lowers his head to Brian's neck and… breathes in. Brian holds still because if he, if he moves, it's like Pat will run away. Skittish. Maybe he'll be skittish, and Brian feels like he's out of his depth on several levels but his dick is also fully aware of the situation.

"I think you are," Pat says, and Brian feels the exhalation of each word on his skin, and then Brian's phone alarm goes off again and Pat's head jerks up, and he lets go of Brian's hand with — oh, with a slow slide of his fingers down to Brian's elbow, and then he stands up and heads into the living room.

Brian's phone alarm is turned off.

Brian breathes out.

==

Brian showers, steals a new set of clothes from Pat’s dresser — they’re not _exactly _the same size, but it works, even if the jeans are real tight in the ass — and finds Pat hovering over the empty nest in the kitchen window.

“Timothy still MIA?” he asks and Pat’s shoulders slump. Brian doesn’t add _can’t say I’m disappointed_, because it seems like kicking a guy when he’s down. Pat cares about that absolute bastard for some reason.

He joins Pat at the sink and looks out at the falling snow. It’s still going — slow, but steady. Brian doesn’t know how to estimate how much snow’s fallen without grabbing a ruler, but he imagines it’s at least a foot. Maybe more. The wind’s the real menace, whipping it up and robbing you of visibility anyway. Ugh, snow.

“Any idea how long it’ll keep snowing, Warden of the Woods?”

Pat picks a piece of pine needle out of the nest and looks down at it. “As long as it has to,” he says cryptically, and there’s a sadness to his expression, a resignation that makes Brian’s chest ache.

Brian bumps their arms together. “Who controls the weather? Your dad? Can we send him a strongly-worded note?”

Pat holds the pine needle between his fingers and cuts it in half with one of his nails. The bits fall into the sink. “I already know how he’d respond.”

“So this _is_ him,” Brian presses, and Pat — leans into him. Touches their shoulders together, and stays.

When he speaks, there’s a thready note to his voice, like he’s. Like he’s still tired. Like maybe he’s a little desperate. “You’d never want to stay here.”

Brian scoffs, and then feels bad for scoffing because Pat sounds so _earnest_. Because Pat’s shoulders hunch further forward and he’s staring down at the halves of pine needle in the sink. And then Brian can’t find it in himself to tell the truth: 

_It’s the nicest cabin I’ve ever been stranded in, but no. Of course not. I have a life, I have family and friends and a job I love and that I’m actually good at. I don’t even like nature all that much. It’s nice to visit. I don’t mind how few trees there are in the city_.

“It’s been nice having someone else in the cabin,” Pat says, and his hand slides into Brian’s for a brief second, squeezes, and is gone quickly enough Brian could discount it having happened at all.

Pat goes into his bedroom and shuts the door behind him.

Brian stands in the kitchen in socked feet and… and opens the fridge to figure out something for breakfast.

He eats refrigerator oatmeal with blueberries (neither of which he thinks were in the fridge yesterday) and picks up his phone from where Pat must’ve set it earlier, on the coffee table. It’s — huh, almost fully charged, which. Which. The generator. The beetle from yesterday, when Brian touched it. His phone was in his pocket.

Huh. Convenient.

It’s only 9. He plays Picross Luna II and waits for Pat to come out, and when it’s 10 and Pat hasn’t yet he puts his phone in his coat pocket and finds the book on bark diseases. He’d already started it anyway. It’s boring as dirt but Brian’s spent hours reading OSHA regulations, so he’s well-equipped.

After three chapters, he tries the door. It’s unlocked, but he hesitates before opening it. He knocks instead, and waits. When there’s no response he knocks harder.

“Hey, were you going out this morning? The trees’ll miss you. You’ve gotta say hi to MacPine for me. That’s my uh, my nickname for the tree that saved my life. Not super original, but I think it’d like it. It sounds Shakespearean.”

The door opens. Pat holds a thick envelope out to him. It’s made of — really quality paper, the kind Brian used to see art students lusting over in the university bookstore.

“Do I… open it?” He mimes running his finger under the seal and Pat shakes his head.

“No, uh.” He frowns, and sucks his lower lip between his teeth. “Can you, uh. Make it smell like you? Rub it over your forehead. Under your arms, maybe.”

Brian’s eyebrows raise. “Pardon?”

“Please,” Pat says through gritted teeth, and he looks embarrassed as hell to be asking it, so Brian does him a solid. Takes a step back and drags it over his face, then shoves it under his arm and holds it like an old-timey thermometer.

“Any reason why this thing needs to smell like me?”

Brian’s expecting something arcane and unknowable, something about _the touch of a human_, but what Pat says is, “He never opens anything from me,” and Brian chokes on a laugh.

“Come again?”

“He’d be _thrilled_ to hear from you,” Pat grumbles, and takes the envelope back. “If you had the power to send him something it’d mean.” He stares out the kitchen window instead of finishing that statement. Brian can fill in the gaps, a little bit. It’d mean Brian had been enthralled, maybe. That Pat had enthralled him.

He moves back until his butt hits the couch, and he leans into it. Looks over the line of Pat’s jaw, then the cord of muscle down his neck. Follows his profile. 

“Do you actually _need_ glasses?”

“Probably not.” Pat’s still looking out the window, like he’s expecting Timothy to fly in at any moment. Or like it’s the best place to look that isn’t Brian. “Got used to the feel of them in college.”

Brian thinks of college. Of the photo of Pat and the woman. He’d looked really — incandescently happy. “Has anyone ever stayed here before, with you?”

Pat shifts between his feet, working his teeth around his bottom lip. “No. Not for this long. People have gotten lost before, ended up here, guided by the trees to someplace they could wait out the cold night, but they’ve always been able to leave before I wanted to come home.”

Pat wanted to come home this time, is all. Or he saw Brian and thought… He saw him and thought something different than what he thought when he saw the other people. He saw Brian and thought —

“Do you want to enthrall me?”

“_No_.” His head snaps towards Brian and he looks — resolute. A little angry, his brow crushing down into his eyes and his lips thinning. “It’s not real. It’s not — I’ve seen it, and it’s not real. None of it’s real, and you can delude yourself into thinking that it is but it’s not. It’s rancid.” He pushes his hair behind his ear and huffs out in exasperation. “It’s not love. They don’t love you. They don’t even like you, they’re terrified of you and they can’t do anything about it, and you bask in their unwilling affection and everyone lies to themselves. It’s — fucking gross, and you don’t deserve that. No one deserves that, but you don’t. _You don’t_.”

It’s the most Pat’s ever said in one go and Brian’s chest aches and he wants… something unquantifiable. Something that escapes him. To touch Pat, maybe. To smooth the anger from his face. “I’m still not scared of you,” he says, and Pat closes his eyes. His body shakes with the force of silent, frustrated laughter.

He walks out of the cabin, envelope in hand, and Brian scrambles for his coat and boots.

==

Pat stands in the middle of the wind and asks it for a favor. His hair whips around his head, tangling in his antlers, and Brian can barely hear him speaking over the sound of it. He’s not wearing shoes.

Brian pulls his coat tighter at the neck and watches, trying to hear what Pat must be hearing when he falls silent.

Pat turns to him after a moment and waves him closer, and Brian tromps through the snow to stand next to him. Pat’s not shivering. The snow’s up to his knees, and it looks like it’s starting to melt around him. He seems fine.

Pat passes him the envelope and Brian takes it, ready to rub it all over again, maybe, but then Pat’s moving behind him and grabbing his forearm, holding the envelope up high above their heads. His other hand settles on Brian’s hip and Brian can feel the heat of him against his back, and Pat’s voice is high and sibilant, like the wind whipping through the trees. Brian feels — weightless, like he’s been submerged in a lukewarm pool, buffeted and carried by something filling the forest around him.

He loses his grip on the envelope and he gasps, reaching for it, but Pat holds his arm still and tightens his hold on his hip, pulls Brian back against him with a firm hand and whispers, "It's the wind," into his ear. "That's what's supposed to happen."

The envelope eddies and swirls up into the air, and Brian tips his head back, almost to Pat's shoulder, to watch it disappear into the sky. He feels cool but not uncomfortable. He feels… proud, and responsible for everything around him in this moment. At peace, but a little sad. Longing.

"Is this your magic?" Brian asks, and he hears his words slur together.

Pat hums and Brian feels Pat's — nose? nuzzle against the back of his head. Gentle. Fond, maybe.

"Come on," Pat says, and takes Brian's hand to lead him back to the cabin. "I'll make you coffee."

Brian's still kind of high on the good stuff but he's not loopy enough to not notice Pat's been keeping the coffee from him, and he tells him this in rambling detail.

Pat manages to offload Brian onto the couch and then shove a mug of steaming coffee into his hands before Brian comes completely back to himself.

Brian breathes in the smell of it, lets it warm his hands. "Is that what it always feels like?"

"It's good coffee, yeah," Pat says from the kitchen, and Brian looks around wearily for something to throw at him and comes up short.

He drinks the coffee instead. "Your magic, you dingus. All… thoughtful." _Lonely_, he doesn't say.

"I guess," Pat replies, and Brian can hear the shrug. "I've never thought about it. I don't have anything to compare it to, no, uh, absence of it. I've never felt anyone else's."

"I didn't know what you were going to do but it was simpler than I'd thought it'd be. Talking to the wind. Heck, everything has been: using a bug to power your house. Walking around with a stick."

"What were you envisioning?" Pat slides on to the couch next to Brian, and Brian shuffles over a little, to give him more room. "Elaborate rituals? Blood sacrifice? Dancing naked in the moonlight?"

"That's witches," Brian says knowledgeably, "but also mostly misogyny disguised as religious fanaticism."

Pat smiles into his mug. "Human magic sounds exhausting."

"Way harder than asking for a favor." 

They sip in silence for a while, until Brian can't let it sit.

"What did you write?"

Pat holds his mug in his lap between his palms and slowly rotates it, his eyes trained on the last inch of coffee sitting in the bottom. Brian's not sure he's gonna get an answer, but then Pat leans into him, pressing their shoulders together. "I left for college without his permission. I told him I wanted to go and he didn't believe me, but my mom knew. She knew I was telling the truth, she knew I was planning to leave and neither of them could stop me. She convinced him to let me go, but I would've done it anyway."

Brian was never a rebellious kid: the thought of explicitly going against what his parents had told him to do made him anxious. He was the kind of kid who fessed up before they found out he’d done anything. (He also threw his brother and sister under the bus, more often than not.) And then when his dad had died it was — he couldn’t do that to his mom.

But Pat’s got parents with starkly different, what, morals than him? Ethics? Can you apply the social mores of late western society to faefolk? He wants to say yes. At least, consent’s not tied to culture. And Pat’s pushing back on it, apparently, so _he_ thinks you can. “So what’d you write?”

“I said I’d leave.” Pat’s tone is easy, like Brian didn’t feel his magic half an hour ago, like he doesn’t still feel the lingering traces of it floating pleasantly under his skin. Like he doesn’t know that Pat… _loves_ this forest, even if Brian’s own feelings about it are anything but. “He stops fucking with us or I leave again.”

“What would happen if you left again? Permanently?” Brian finishes his coffee and leans back into the corner of the couch, and Pat mimics him.

“Dunno. The woods here have always been protected.” He shrugs a shoulder. “Maybe they’d be cut down. Maybe they’d be fine. Maybe the trees would get diseased, get overrun by blister rot.” He’s trying to sound blasé, Brian can tell, but he’s only half-pulling it off. He’s frowning.

“You don’t have to do that.” Brian puts his mug on the coffee table — stays leaning forward. Closer to him. “You can make another stick, have it lead me back to the ski lodge. You can — God, you can probably _carry_ me back, can’t you?”

“I’m not more powerful than my dad,” Pat says, and he looks like he hadn’t considered the option but also like he’s instantly dismissed it. “I couldn’t keep you from him: we’d get separated, you’d get lost. Something would steal your stick again.”

Brian starts to gnaw his thumbnail. The sparkling white polish (_like snow!_ he’d proclaimed happily before their trip) is starting to flake, and not even that’s gonna keep him from biting his nail down to the quick during this conversation. “Why’d Timothy take the dowsing rod? When I was trying to get back here?”

Pat pulls one of his feet up onto the couch — still barefoot, the bottom of his pant leg still damp — and rests an elbow on his knee. “My mom doesn’t like, uh. The same kind of drawn-out plans my dad does. She’s more a fan of _get them feeling indebted to you and reel ‘em in_. It’s, well, it’s faster. So I’m guessing she was hoping for… that.”

Brian snorts. “For me to fall all over you when you rescued me?”

And then Pat — gosh, his cheeks and forehead go red, and Brian’s torn between being _delighted_ and having to ignore the warmth suddenly pooling in his gut. Pat picks at some lint on the thigh of his pajama pants and clears his throat. “I’m sorry, for, uh. I never apologized for touching — for changing your clothes. After that. I took some liberties. So, sorry.”

Brian… aches.

This entire situation would be easier if Pat were a jerk. If his unfortunate lack of awareness regarding things like personal space was backed up by somebody who didn’t seem to _care_ that he was making you uncomfortable — if he were pushy, if he were demanding. The whole _I’m Big and Scary and You Should Fear Me_ display was over the top and not great, but Brian has the sense he’s not the first person to stand in front of Pat — but that maybe he’s the first person to hold his ground.

“I think,” he says, and he tugs at a hangnail, hesitating when it stings and a prick of blood appears alongside the nailbed. “I think it’s, uh. I never knew you as anyone but who you are, y’know?”

Pat’s staring at him with unblinking eyes, which is less than ideal, but Brian forges on. He’s not interrupting Brian’s non sequitur anyway.

“Like, I woke up and it was _bam_, dude with horns, right out of the gate, and I was expecting some burly mountain man with an elephant gun. And it’s not like I _know_ you, right, three days stuck in a cabin with somebody isn’t enough time to learn everything you should know about a person, but you’re decent. You’ve been really — kind to me, and you didn’t have to be. You’ve got some things to work out, probably, but I do too.”

Pat laughs humorlessly and opens his mouth and Brian doesn’t let him speak.

“And more than anything I think,” Brian says, and he swallows, and he stares down at his thumbnail, at the blood filling his nailbed, “I think you like it here. I think you belong here, and I think it sucks that I don’t.”

Pat doesn’t say anything. When Brian looks up at him, his eyes look distant, and his mouth is drawn down in an unhappy line, and Brian knows he doesn't have any reason to feel bad, Pat would probably insist as much, but he still does.

"Can I show you something?" Pat asks. He sits up straight, sliding his foot back to the floor. His expression is still a little lost, but when Brian nods it clears. Turns into something determined. Kind of obstinate.

"Let me get my shoes," Brian says and Pat shakes his head, mutters something like _no need_ and pulls Brian by the hand towards the door. "I'm not a forest god deer man like you, Pat!" Brian objects, but then they're standing on the porch and Pat's shifting in front of him.

There's more light outside, sun filtering down through the trees and reflecting off the snow falling and what's already fallen, so when Pat changes there's a swell of darkness in the space where he stands but Brian can still see. He can still see it happen.

There's no cracking of bones, no grotesque splits of skin and sinew. Fur seems to sprout from beneath Pat's skin, spread out from beneath his clothes. He gets — bigger. It's like watching the Hulk transform, but instead of big and green and naked, Pat's big and deep brown, the color of his hair, and furry. There's… there _is_ green there, hilariously, but it's moss, thick moss intertwined throughout his coat and circling his neck like some back-to-nature Elizabethan collar you could probably find on Etsy for $300. Brian recognizes his antlers. He _does_ have a snout. His face is… disconcertingly deer-like, not quite what you'd expect. An uncanny valley stag, with too-thick lips and forward-facing eyes. He hunches forward on the porch, almost on all fours, so he can blink languidly at Brian, his massive head at eye-level.

Brian's heart is racing but he's not scared. It's adrenaline, the kind you get on a roller coaster — excitement laced with fear, but what you let yourself feel when you trust the engineer who built it.

"Oh," Brian says, and he reaches forward. Keeps reaching when Pat doesn't pull away, slides his hand up one of Pat's antlers and watches Pat's eyes slip shut. "You're. Wowie."

Pat laughs, the sound rumbling out from deep within his chest, and Brian drops his hand to Pat's face, to — listen, he'd never scritch Pat's nose normally but there's an innate part of him that sees a snout and wants to scritch it. Pat seems to like it, anyway.

"Thank you for showing me this," Brian says, "when the point wasn't to freak me out."

"This isn't what I'm showing you," Pat says, and he drops down until he's nearly lying on the porch. "C'mon."

Brian stares. "That's. You have to know how weird that request is."

"Come on," Pat says, and rolls his eyes at him, and Brian breathes in slowly and steels himself and does _not_ make any sort of _riding Pat_ joke to himself and clambers on top of Pat's broad back.

==

Brian has never gone horseback riding. Horses are creatures that are best viewed from far away, if that, so he doesn't know what's involved in riding something. (Someone.) He holds onto the mossy ruff around Pat's neck — it feels solid, like it's a part of him, so he's not so much a deer man as a deer plant man? — and wraps his legs as far as they'll go around his middle, and he buries his face in Pat's fur as they gallop through the woods.

At least Pat was right — Brian didn't need his boots.

Pat stutters to a stop and lifts his head, smelling the air, and Brian looks around. He doesn't know how to tell what part of the forest they're in but Pat seems to, because he huffs and moves slowly towards a collection of trees, barely visible through the snow.

"Do you see like normal?" Brian asks, mouth muffled against fur, but Pat hears him.

"Not… exactly." The depth of his voice rumbles through Brian's body, lodging in his chest. "The forest is more pronounced. It's more…" He grunts, like he's frustrated, and he raises a hand — it's almost a hand, a wrist with two fingers, like his hand fused and left him a thumb and a pointer, like his palm split — to push a low-hanging branch out of the way as he moves them into the middle of… oh.

It's a circle of trees, and there's not as much snow on the ground here. The trees' upper branches interlock together, providing shelter from the weather — there are even patches of bare pine needles. Patches of pine needles and.

"Oh," Brian says as Pat hunkers down to the ground, letting him off. His feet crunch in the traces of snow, on the needles, and maybe he should've brought shoes but he feels warm. Nothing pricks the soles of his feet.

There are flowers blooming in the center of the circle — little white bell-shaped flowers, clustered together on their stems — and Brian crouches down next to them and breathes in deep. They smell almost overwhelming in the absence of anything else, just the pines and snow to compete. "Are you doing this?" he asks quietly, because it feels wrong to be loud here. Disrespectful.

He feels Pat's snout against his shoulder, then the bright cold and wet of his nose against the back of his neck before Pat hooks his head over Brian's shoulder like a massive dog. "No," he says, and Brian wonders if he's doing it on purpose, making sure he's close when he talks, so Brian feels the vibrations of it. "They do this for me."

"Like a thank you."

"I guess, yeah," Pat says, and Brian reaches up and tangles his fingers in the shaggy, mossy fur of Pat's neck. "I could've gone a lot of places. But I was… twelve, maybe, and I ran away from home because I was mad about something. And I could barely control the shift, could barely manage anything, and I ended up in a forest of white pines."

The trees around the circle… creak, as though the wind is blowing them inward. There's a rustling of leaves, and Brian feels like he's being talked about. Like trees are gossips.

"And they listened to me bitch and drew me deeper in, and then I was here. This copse of trees and there were flowers blooming then too, and I felt safe. Uh, loved. Like I didn't have to do anything special, or fucking — be anybody here. I could just take care of them, and they'd take care of me."

"You left once," Brian says, and he feels… a bone deep sadness, a longing that he isn't sure is entirely his own. It could be from the trees. It could be Pat. Maybe — maybe it_ could_ be his. 

Pat hums, the sound more like a prolonged grunt. "I only knew what I could figure out. What I guessed, what the trees told me they already knew. But you can… if I read something in a book, if I learn how an arborist fixes rot, I can adapt it, I can make it more efficient with magic. I had to learn more, I needed to know more to help more. They understood. They supported me. They knew I'd come back."

"You don't have to leave again," Brian says, and the trees rustle. The flowers seem to bend in an imaginary breeze, like they're reaching out to him. To Pat. "We'll figure something out, right, because even if you go it doesn't mean I could get out, and —"

"My parents know this place is powerful. They let me stay here because they were happy with my choice, because the last fae here had moved on and there was a role that needed filling. They want me here, and leaving is the only leverage I have over them. So he'll stop the fucking storm."

Brian can picture it not happening. If they don't relent, Pat will leave and maybe the forest will wither, or maybe nothing will happen. Maybe Brian will be able to make his way out, or maybe he'll stay in the cabin for the rest of his life and try to learn how to talk to trees. Maybe Pat will move to New York and live where there are no trees at all except in parks and they'll both be miserable.

It's a monumentally shitty plan, but Brian doesn't know how to outwit a faery who can make it snow for 3 days straight. Pat's idea is probably the best one they've got. God.

"It's really beautiful here," Brian tells Pat, because Pat wanted to show him this, and it's not fair to just be unhappy. It _is_ beautiful. It feels like Pat's magic here, but older — more patient. The same familiar kindness.

He turns his head and Pat's watching him, his strange eyes hopeful, like he thought this might… might convince Brian to stay. To decide he could live in the middle of the woods and learn about the trees. To keep him company.

"I'm getting cold," Brian says, which isn't true but Pat doesn't call him on it. Pat lets him on his back and moves slowly out of the copse of trees and then at a faster clip, and Brian closes his eyes against the wind.

If Pat's plan does work, if his dad blinks, then Brian may get to leave tomorrow. He'll see Laura and Jonah, and tell them about the eccentric woodsman who let him crash on his couch and taught him about the pines. He'll be able to go home and sleep in his own bed and annoy his cat and make funny videos on the internet. He'll look up _Patrick Gill_ and see if there's any record of him, of his time at UMaine, of who he was when he wasn't where he should be. He'll probably forget details, in time, of the deer man in the woods. Maybe he'll think he hallucinated most of it, snow-addled and starving.

Pat's pace slows when the cabin comes into view, and Brian feels a rush of contentment that he can't pass off as belonging to anyone but him. It's not the feeling of home, but it's close.

It could be, he realizes, and that's the scariest thing that's happened to him yet.

Pat lets him off on the porch but he doesn't shift back. He slumps down and lets his arms… front hooves… hang over the edge of the steps, and Brian considers going back inside but sits down next to him instead, perpendicular to him, so he can shove his toes under Pat's bulk.

"Thank you for showing me that," Brian says eventually, and Pat nods before curling towards him, his long neck allowing him to lay his head over Brian's feet. Like a sleeping deer, Brian realizes, and he leans forward and rests his own head in the scruff of Pat's neck. It's… easy, to be this tactile with him like this. Who doesn't want to cuddle a giant Ghibli deer.

"I'm sorry I don't want to stay," he says, and Pat makes a sound like Brian hurt him, and Brian keeps his face hidden against soft, mossy fur.

Pat says, "It's been nice, having someone here," and Brian doesn't know if there's lingering magic nestled within him, or if the trees are shouting loud enough he can hear them, or if he just — knows, but he hears _having _you_ here_ and _I'll miss you_ and _I would never make you stay but I wish you would_.

Brian pushes his fingers into Pat's fur and breathes in the scent of him, like early morning air on a camping trip, and he laughs, because that's what you do when you're happy and sad all at once. "I don't know how to kiss you with that mouth," he says, and when he pulls back Pat twists his head up, eyes wide.

"What?" Pat says, and Brian smiles at him, a little heart broken, and Pat moves into his space.

"What?" Brian says back, looking into Pat's strange eyes, and Pat starts to shift, colors kaleidoscoping across his skin, and he presses forward and Brian grabs at him, and Pat's tongue licks across Brian's lips and he gasps, and then it's inside his mouth, running along the inside of his teeth, and there are thick hoof-hands on his waist that are rapidly changing, and Brian feels Pat's fur fade into beard where it scratches against his chin as Pat kisses him, as Brian kisses him back.

"Inside, inside," Brian prompts when Pat licks over his chin and down his throat, absolutely — hot, undeniably hot but also kind of weird, and Pat stands and he's still tall, taller than usual, like the shift didn't go all the way through. He holds a hand out to Brian and pulls him upright, and Brian knows what he said but he also knows Pat's mouth is right there, and he grabs at Pat's hair, _oh_, at one of his antlers, and Pat whines and kisses him. His tongue is too long. His tongue is too long, fucking into Brian's mouth and Brian sucks at it and tugs Pat's antler like he's steering him towards the door, and Pat picks him up, hands under his ass like he weighs nothing, and Brian wraps his legs around his waist as he's carried inside.

They run into the bedroom door and Brian has to fumble for the knob, has to focus around the way Pat's tongue is almost choking him in, oh, the best way, like he can't get enough of him, like he's savoring him, and then Pat's lowering him to the bed and looming over him in the dark of the room, and Brian tries to catch his breath, loosening his grip on Pat and falling back to the mattress.

"It's been, uh," Pat says, and his voice is in that eerie middle space, too deep for his body. "It's been a really long time."

"Okay." Brian scoots up the bed until his feet clear the end and he pats the comforter next to him. He waits to see if his heartbeat chills out, but — nope. Apparently not. "You wanna talk? We could talk."

Pat frowns and he, okay, he climbs up the bed on all fours, and his limbs are longer than they should be too. All of him, slightly beyond what Brian expects.

"I," Pat says, and he holds Brian's gaze for a moment before Brian licks his lips, and then he drops his head and drags his tongue in a sweeping line up Brian's neck to just behind his ear, "no, that's not. I know what I want."

"Sweet — fuck," Brian laughs. He yanks at an antler until Pat's face is in front of his and he kisses him, quick. "I want to remember this. You," he says, and Pat's expression clouds before clearing, before he leans in and kisses him back.

"Kind of want you to fuck me," Brian says into Pat's mouth, and Pat whines again and breaks the kiss, dropping his head to Brian's shoulder, and Brian threads his fingers through Pat's hair and scratches his nails against his scalp. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Pat breathes, then, "Can I eat you out?" and Brian almost blacks out at the rush of blood to his dick at the thought of_ that tongue_ in his ass.

"Yes, yes, _wow_, I'd be offended if you didn't," he says, and Pat sits back on his haunches and — oh, Brian was just. It was vernacular, but. But Pat has haunches right now, Brian hadn't noticed before. His hips jut out from his body, straining his jeans, and Brian follows him, sits up and reaches out. Slides his fingers under the waistband of Pat's jeans to feel the bone under taut skin.

"Sorry. I can —"

"No," Brian says, and he looks up at Pat's conflicted expression, like he's waiting for Brian to tell him, nope, we're done, thanks. Like Brian wasn't fucking horny for him the first time he shifted. "No, it's good. Stay like this or, or be however you're comfortable. I, uh." He twists his mouth into a grin, wicked, distracting, because he doesn't want to devote the next hour to what he's learning about his own sexuality. "I'm into you. This. You."

And Pat surges forward and their teeth clack together before they're kissing again, and his hands struggle with the closure on Brian's jeans, and Brian lifts his hips so Pat can tug them and his boxers down.

"Shit." Pat draws away from his mouth and breathes, like he's trying to center himself, and then shuffles down the bed and finishes pulling everything off. He wraps his hands around Brian's ankles, digging his thumbs into the meat of Brian's calves.

Brian levers himself up with an elbow and looks down at him, at his unworldly face, the shape just off enough for him to know Pat isn't human. Pat holds his gaze and Brian feels… studied. Like he's being catalogued for, oh, for Pat to remember later, and Brian sits up fully. Unbuttons his — Pat's — shirt, chucking it over the side of the bed.

"Do you, uh. Like what you see?" He wants to think he's being smooth. He knows there's a better chance he sounds like a kid, anxious and overeager — wanting the cute boy to tell him he's hot, that he thinks his dick looks good.

Pat's eyes pour over him in a slow crawl and Brian has to force himself to not react, to not slide a hand down to cover his junk. It helps that when Pat looks at his dick he mutters _fuck_ and then ducks down to kiss Brian's hip, his thigh.

"Tell me if," Pat says, and Brian's dick jumps at the proximity of that _voice _two inches away, "if you don't like, uh. Or anything. Tell me if you _do_ like — actually, uh. Just talk to me." And then Pat's hand curves around Brian's dick and he's sucking Brian down like he's never even heard of a gag reflex, like that's something that happens to _humans_, and Brian jerks forward like he's been electrocuted and grabs onto — shit, onto Pat's antlers.

The sound pulled out of him is almost a sob, just, just a lot of stimulation all at once, Pat's hand holding him firm, circling slowly, his mouth, God, his tongue working him like his dick's a fucking lollipop, and when Pat makes a questioning noise, Brian uncurls a hand from an antler, smooths it across the side of Pat's face, into his hair.

"Shit," he says intelligibly, because Pat asked, because he told Brian to talk, because maybe — and Brian's a romantic, hopeless and heart-on-his-sleeve, but maybe Pat wants to know who he's touching. Wants Brian to remind him he's there, because.

Because of something Brian's not going to think about right now, because he doesn't want to have sad sex. He wants to have — good sex. Fun sex.

"Are you, ha, do you, do you need to breathe?"

And it's a weird sensation, someone laughing with your dick in their throat, and Pat pulls back and looks up at Brian with spit slick lips and an incredulous smile on his handsome face, and Brian tugs at his antler.

"Honest question," Brian says, even as his voice breaks a little, Pat's hand slowly sliding on his dick.

"No," Pat replies, and Brian stares at him.

"Are you pulling my leg?"

"I'm pulling your dick," he says, and Brian closes his eyes and pretends that cheesy joke pained him and laughs.

"I've never, uh, tested the limits of how long I can go," Pat says, and Brian blames — well, himself, his own horny brain, for how that really adds a dimensional layer to the thought of being eaten out. He's never sat on anybody's face before. "There's a lake about five miles north," he says, and Brian tries to concentrate, but Pat's carefully drawing the edge of a fingernail along the length of Brian's dick and it's — distracting. "I'll go in the summer sometimes, sit at the bottom and listen to the fish."

"Good communicators, fish?" Brian asks around a gasp, and Pat hums.

"They're pretty fin-tastic listeners."

"Oh my God." Brian lets go of Pat's antler and collapses back on the bed, and then hisses _oh my God_ because the hand not on his dick is pushing his knee up, bending his leg until his foot is flat on the mattress, so Pat can brush a finger down slowly over his balls towards his ass.

"What? Not a fin of puns?"

"You can't use the same pun twice in a row — _oh_." Brian forces himself to breathe past the feeling of Pat's finger — _fingers_ caressing him, his, God, his hole, and he's usually less. He's usually less _lie back and think of England_ about sex but he's a little. He's a little overwhelmed right now.

"Sorry," Pat says, and Brian can feel the heat of his breath against his fucking taint, "Gill-ty as charged."

"You're the worst," Brian laughs out. Shudders when Pat mouths at him, when he — _shit_, when his tongue glides over his fingers, over Brian's asshole, and Brian curls his toes into the bedspread and tries to stay relaxed, tries not to fucking clench. "You can probably, uh, go for it. Add one, uh, maybe _moray_ fingers."

Pat huffs _oh my cod_ — really, he really does, the bastard — against Brian's ass and Brian's laughing when Pat licks inside him, when Pat stretches him open with a finger and his, God, Brian's not any kind of expert but he's pretty sure someone could make a cast of Pat's tongue. Probably. Sell it online, call it "Forest God Tongue Dildo (Deer)" and — and Brian's rambling because the alternative is concentrating on the slick slide of Pat's tongue and —

"_Fuck_," he bites out, his leg spasming, his foot smacking into Pat's side, his hands grabbing wildly down for, for some kind of purchase, for Pat's hair or his antlers or, shit, because that's a Goddamn tongue circling against his prostate and that's. That's.

He finds Pat's antlers and holds firm, pulls him closer, twists his hands around the branching bone, and Pat rumbles low. The sound vibrates through Brian, through where they connect, through where Pat’s just — tongue fucking him. Somebody once told him the tongue was the strongest muscle in the body and then someone else immediately had said that wasn’t true but Brian’s willing to believe it. He can believe it, he can believe Pat’s tongue is, it’s. Oh. Oh fuck, it’s currently the strongest muscle in Brian’s body, that’s — that’s for sure.

Which is a thing to consider. Which is, wow, he met a hot guy who has some truly unknowable baggage but seems to think Brian’s the bee’s knees, to a startling degree, and he’s laid Brian out in his bed and is, well. Is some kind of fae spirit with an extendable tongue who’s devoted to making Brian feel good, apparently.

To feel wanted.

Fuck.

He — he tries to breathe normally but he can’t, his legs keep shuddering, his chest is tight, Pat’s mouth is, it’s obscene, and they can’t have been like this long but if he touched Brian’s dick that’d be the end of it, and. Or if _Brian_ touched his dick, except. Except he can’t unclench his hands from Pat’s antlers, can’t concentrate well enough to think through the steps of uncurling his fingers one by one. Can barely focus on what he’s actually feeling without wanting to shy away from it, thinking about something else, thinking about — fuck, _goofs_, or the lingering sadness on the edges of his mind, and not about the thickness of Pat’s tongue where it’s stretching out his hole. He can’t. God, he can’t. “Pat, _Pat_, c’mon, you’ve. You’ve gotta, you have to.”

Pat makes that sound again, low and resonant, like he’s — like he’s savoring the taste, and Brian presses his head back against the bed and _feels_, knows that it took no time at all to reduce him to, to this, to shaking and rambling, but what the hell else is supposed to happen when Pat’s tongue’s going on a fucking exploratory journey and his mouth is, he’s pushed in close and he’s sucking at Brian’s skin and Brian’s going to. He’s going to.

“Touch, fuck, please, touch me, can you just,” Brian stammers, and Pat doesn’t. Or at least he doesn’t change up what he’s doing, he’s still, ha, still touching Brian, pretty _intimately_. “How do you go from, from 0 to 60, oh my God, most people don’t.”

And then there’s less pressure, less wet, less tongue fucking massaging his prostate, and Brian breathes out in a rush. Bereft.

“Too much?” Pat growls from between his legs, and Brian jerks him forward by the antlers, not his finest moment, steering Pat back — God, there’s a joke in there somewhere about _steers_ and _antlers_ but his brain is a quantity of tongue-addled mush — to his ass, but Pat laughs, the burst of air cool on Brian’s wet skin before Pat’s tongue _slithers_ back in, and Brian moans like a man dying.

“Yes,” he gasps, “kinda, but also, God, keep, if you stop I’m not, I’m not responsible for what happens,” and then Pat’s tongue, his finger, oh, he’s slid a finger in, maybe — maybe more, Brian can’t tell, but all of it, Pat _vibrates_ with laughter and Brian sobs, and if, shit, “Touch, for fuck, fuck’s sake, you should touch me.”

And Brian convulses, every muscle in him going taut, his hole tightening around Pat, he can feel it so distinctly, when Pat’s other hand is suddenly on his dick, and Brian presses his head back into the mattress and comes with a shout loud enough to — to startle the trees, probably.

He doesn’t black out, per se, but he does… feel floaty. Warm, and corralled up in _Pat_, in his grip in his bed in his home, and it takes him a long moment to realize there’s a wet warmth across his stomach, because Pat’s methodically mouthing the come off his skin.

“Oh my God,” Brian breathes out, and Pat glances up at him with a quick grin before returning to his — his work, until Brian’s skin is bare and Pat’s licking his lips with a tongue still too long for his mouth. There’s a protest somewhere in him, Brian thinks. In the back of his brain — and it’s only pushed to the forefront when Pat slides up the bed and mouths at his neck, presses a kiss to his chin.

“No, no, hey, bathroom, teeth, hey,” he says, and his arms are like noodles but he can shove at Pat’s shoulders… gently. And when Pat laughs, Brian grimaces. “No, really, hard rule, king of the forest, we’re not dogs, clean your —”

“Mouth’s clean,” Pat says, before licking along Brian’s jawline. "Pine fresh," he continues before he kisses him, his tongue dragging across Brian’s lips, and it's — maddeningly true, his mouth tastes like the dang forest smells, clean and crisp, and then Pat says, "You wanna hear something cool? I've never brushed my teeth. Not once."

“That’s not — magic is a big deal, you shouldn’t use it so. So,” Brian says, and Pat angles himself off the bed and lifts a brow.

“You’re just jealous.”

“I got my first cavity when I was ten, you bastard,” Brian says, and he loops an arm around Pat’s neck and pulls him in to kiss while Pat laughs, because he’s terrible.

And they kiss for... a while. Brian’s not usually invested in kissing, even with as good a kisser as Pat is, responsive and uh, thorough. Not as an end to itself, not unless it’s a precursor to something, and it probably is but there’s no immediacy to it right now. He can feel Pat’s dick against his hip, but Brian’s loose and soft and warm and Pat’s not pushing, and there’s something calming about lying here with him, about being weighted down by his bulk. About Pat meticulously mapping out his face with gentle kisses, like Brian’s… special, or something.

(Pat had called him unique. He’d looked down at him and said it with sincerity.)

“Do you still want to,” Brian finally starts, lucidity within his reach again, his hands moving in slow patterns down Pat’s wide back, "do you want to fuck me?"

Pat hums, and rocks his hips forward once, and he sucks at the skin just behind Brian's ear. "Considering it," he says, and Brian snorts. Walks his fingers up Pat's back until he can tangle them in his hair.

"Definitive," he says, and tugs at Pat's hair until he lifts his head. Until Brian can look at his dark eyes. At his stupidly handsome face, at the patches of white in his beard. "Where a faery kissed you," he wonders, and when Pat frowns at him, "Nothing."

"How do you feel about magic?" Pat asks, prompted by the faery mention probably, and there's humor in his tone but he looks serious. "About… differences."

"Why?" Brian pets his hair. "Like, bodilly?” he clarifies, and when Pat nods, “I mean, tongue, yeah, but is there." He frowns. "Is there something else I should know about, going into this?" He's clearly already invested, he's sure Pat would grant him that. He's been a good sport. He’s been, uh. Eager.

Pat head tilts to one side. "You're really into the deer thing." Which is — slander. And sounds grosser than the reality, which is Brian's really into the _Pat_ thing, and Pat just happens to be a deer man. "So I feel like I need to say I don't, uh, have a dick bone."

Brian's focus zones in on the heft of Pat's dick against him, like he could feel it if it _did_ have one. Not that Brian has any idea what a dick bone would feel like anyway, and yes, this is different, Patrick, but also kind of… interesting. Different in a way Brian's not going to dismiss outright.

"I didn’t even know deer had dick bones. And, more uh, importantly," Brian says, because now he's thinking about it, "_could_ you?"

And Pat laughs, and kisses him, neither of which is a _no_. "I, uh, I used to..." He _blushes_, gosh, and Brian watches in delight as his ears and then his cheeks redden. "Nothing major, but I met someone in college and would, uh, sometimes make my tongue bigger, which you know but. Or my fingers, or, uh, my dick. When we were fucking."

It's bad form, talking about an ex when you're in bed with your current… fling, but Brian's moving past that, because. _Because_. "Do you have an inflatable dick."

"For fuck's sake," Pat says, but he doesn't deny it, and Brian bends his knee and presses it into Pat's side. Pulls his hair.

"No, this is important, Pat, for science, for _magic_, do you? Can you like — shapeshift whatever you want, whenever? Or does it have to be all over? Because — you’re kind of bigger right now. All of you, not just your, ha, tongue.”

Brian catches the end of an eyeroll. His bet is Pat doesn’t believe his intentions are purely for the good of science, and not for any personal reason or gain.

“It’s harder to hold up, but yeah. Takes more energy to half ass it. I prefer to whole ass things. But there wasn’t an option to whole ass anything in college so I half assed it when I got… good results.” His smile bends wicked for a second, and Brian’s not gonna press about whether those _results_ were pretty girls thinking he was a great fuck, but he’s got an idea.

But Pat said he would’ve preferred to whole ass it. Which… could mean just about anything, he supposes. Any phase of shift, maybe, or the full thing: Pat nine feet tall and heavy enough to break the bed, with a voice low enough to vibrate your bones and a grip that could hurt but never would.

Which. Okay, maybe Brian’s into this for reasons other than Pat being himself. That's — there's nothing wrong with that. Lots of people are into uh, the fantasy. In general.

"Can this baby hold you up when you're shifted?" he asks, slapping the bed, and Pat raises an unimpressed eyebrow. "_What_, it's an honest question. Motivated by curiosity. What's your preferred form anyway?"

"I don't really fit in the house," Pat says, and he sounds unreasonably suspicious. Like Brian has untoward goals here. Which, sure. _Fine_. "So this is what works."

"Hm." Brian pets his hair, a little, and feels just this side of conniving when he says, "I'm open to uh, the whole ass. Try anything once Gilbert, that's what they call me."

Pat goes rigid — and then he jerks out of his grip, pushing himself up, and the look he fixes Brian with is furious. "You stupid motherfucker."

It's — it's jarring, the change, and Brian feels his chest clench. "What—"

"Fuck, your name's — _fuck_," Pat snarls, and he shoves off of Brian and sits up on the edge of the bed, his hands curling around the mattress.

Brian feels frozen in place. He didn't tell him his full name. He just said…

"It's my last name," he says, because maybe that matters. Maybe Pat will stop staring at the floor like he's trying to bore a hole in it. "It's not." God, what did he tell Pat his name was? "Jeremy Gilbert might get you someone but it won't be me."

"That doesn't…" Pat raises a fist and pounds it against his leg, like he's decreeing law. "I don't need all of it. I just need…"

He whips his head towards Brian, his eyes narrow, and Brian feels something foreign tug at the center of his chest, as though a gentle finger were hooked around his sternum. As though it were beckoning him. Like he belongs — like someone loves him, and they want him closer. Like he could be warm, taken care of… cherished, if he only...

And then it's gone, and Brian feels — alone, a crashing wave of grief like he just learned someone died. He lays his palm against his chest and breathes in sharply, and Pat grimaces and looks back at the floor.

"I don't need all of it," Pat repeats, and his head slowly drops between his shoulders. Guilty, maybe.

Brian catches his breath. The grief lingers. He knows he should feel scared right now — that's the correct reaction. The smart reaction. Not the sadness he feels instead. Not the guilt, that… that he fucked up.

"I trust you," he says into the quiet between them, and Pat's head drops lower.

"I could keep you here forever," Pat says, and his voice breaks.

Brian doesn't know him. Not really, not in depth, not… but he does. Enough. Not in every way that matters, not as well as he could, if they'd had any semblance of time not dictated by snowstorms and micromanaging fae and the world outside the forest.

But it's still enough. He knows what makes Pat happy. He knows what pisses him off. He has firsthand experience with Pat being intimidating but there's always an element of persuasion to it, like he's trying to convince Brian of his bullshit.

"My name's Brian," Brian says, and Pat makes a noise like Brian took a knife to his gut, and Brian inches forward on the bed and reaches for one of his hands, pulls it from his leg and carefully uncurls his fingers. Threads Pat's and his together. "And I'm still not afraid of you, and I trust you're not actually gonna do anything with that knowledge."

"I could," Pat says, miserable, and Brian squeezes his hand.

"I know," he says, and Pat turns towards him, folding his leg in the bed.

"I could keep you here. Never let you leave." Even as he says it his expression twists, like he's disgusted with himself for voicing it.

Brian shrugs a shoulder. "You won't."

"I _could_," Pat says, God, _anguished_, and his eyes are dark and deep, and his whole form shimmers like a mirage on a hot day, like he's having trouble keeping shape.

Brian watches the edges of him fluctuate, and holds his hand even more fiercely tight. "What's your name, Pat?"

Pat shakes his head, like Brian asked an impossible question, and he moves back onto the bed, straddles Brian's legs and climbs up the length of him, until their faces are aligned and Pat's strange, beautiful eyes are inches from his. And Brian feels —

It's not like the, the beginnings of enthrallment from earlier, that overwhelming draw, and it's not like the love and the loneliness of the grove. It's deeper: the quiet of a late spring morning when you're camping and you're woken by birdsong, and no one else is awake and sun is filtering through the zipper on your tent, and when you carefully, quietly get out of your sleeping bag and step outside it's bright and crisp and covered in dew, and you stay quiet because it feels sacred. Because you've been given a gift.

"I don't know how to pronounce that," Brian whispers, and Pat laughs, his expression softening, like the grey light of dawn, and Brian cradles his face and kisses him.

Pat lets Brian keep hold of him while he settles next to him on the bed, his arm around Brian's waist, and he gently, thoroughly maps Brian's mouth with his tongue, then coaxes Brian's into his mouth, and gosh, Brian really should revise his opinion on kissing.

They lay together for ages, trading slow, searching kisses until Brian's heart is calmed and Pat's loose against him. Until Pat's making contented noises deep in his chest, nothing like purring but close enough in theory Brian plans to make a joke later… And maybe it's longer, it must be longer, lying there with him, because between one moment and the next Brian falls asleep.

==

There's wet cold against his cheek and he shoves Zuko away from him except — Zuko's built like a brick house and doesn't budge. "Cat, c'mon," Brian mumbles and rolls onto his side away from Zuko, and the cold wet drags across the back of his neck. "It's _early_," Brian protests and pushes up onto an elbow and twists his head around to glare at —

Pat. Who's apparently determined his bed _can_ hold him while he's shifted. Who's taking up most of the mattress, his hind legs spread across the end, cupping Brian's feet.

"Good morning." Brian can barely take in the whole of his face from this close. He twists over and looks up at him, his strange but captivating face — and he rubs Pat's cold nose with his thumb. "Didn't expect to see you here."

Pat snorts, and the sound reverberates down Brian's hand, his arm. "I haven't slept like this in a while. Thought I'd see what it was like."

Brian touches his snout, mars the easy whorls of dark fur there, before running his fingertips over Pat's dark lips. "Sweet dreams?"

Pat's mouth opens to reply and there are no teeth there, everything set back in his jaw, and Brian can't imagine they're sharp but he still thinks about touching them. No one else has probably ever done that.

"No dreams," Pat says, but he sounds relieved, so maybe that's a good thing. Maybe fae don't dream like humans do: inconsequentially. "How'd you sleep?"

Brian stretches his legs out, far enough he can drag his toes against Pat's fur. "Good. You uh, tuckered me out. Good job, you."

Pat huffs a laugh, the bed creaking beneath them, and Brian wonders what time it is, how long it's been since they sent Pat's note to his dad, and then immediately after — like his brain is protecting him from what that note entails — if Pat's being like this is… a hint. Is Pat's way of testing the waters, so to speak.

Or if Brian's just being morning horny and presuming. Not that he's ever been in this situation before, but. Shit. This is Pat — or part of him. Maybe the most Pat can be.

"Would you stay like this if you could? If it were convenient?"

"If I'd built a cabin for this instead of a human?" he asks, and Brian hums. "Maybe. I mentioned, it's less effort. But I, uh." The ruff around his neck shivers, and he licks his lips, his tongue glancing over Brian's fingers at his mouth. "I really like clothes? I've got this metal band shirt I got in Orono that wouldn't, clearly wouldn't fit me."

"I've mostly seen you in plaid," Brian teases, and Pat huffs. "And out of plaid," he continues, walking his fingers down Pat's broad neck, until he can slide them into his thick ruff. God, it's like a mane.

"You've seen me like this," Pat rumbles, and his nose pushes into Brian's hair, presses cold against his ear.

"Yeah," Brian says, and he's definitely morning horny but he also doesn't think he's presuming, "but not all of you." He sweeps his gaze as far down Pat's torso as he can see, and Pat's laugh shakes out against him, through him.

"Not my fault you didn't look at my dick."

Brian bites back his own laughter and smacks his free hand against Pat’s chest, gasping dramatically. "I was talking about your —" and then he stumbles, shit, what hasn't he seen, he's had several opportunities to review Pat's big boy form, he's ridden him like a horse for God's sake, "your… hooves — okay, your dick, you got me.”

“Mm.” Pat noses Brian’s neck and then licks him, a long stripe down to his collarbone. “I got you?”

Brian’s hand sinks far enough into Pat’s ruff that he can feel skin stretched across bone and hot to the touch. “That’s suddenly very much the plan, yeah. If you’re into it.”

“You’re deeply weird,” Pat says with a fondness that strikes Brian between the ribs, and then one of his — God, _hooves_ really is the best way to describe them, isn’t it, because the alternative is _thick two-fingered short hand_ and that’s the wrong kind of a mouthful — hooves presses flat against Brian’s chest and pushes him onto his back.

The bed creaks again when Pat moves, when Pat looms over him, and Brian swallows and feels his own heartbeat, loud and fierce and speeding up. There’s no way he can look down without it being obvious so he just… does it. Looks down and sees the shadowed shape of, right, _right_, sweet fuck, Pat’s dick hanging between his legs. Big enough to _hang_. Sweet… fuck.

“How does this, um,” he says, dragging his gaze back up to Pat’s face, scratching his nails against Pat’s skin — his neck? shoulder? — and relishing the way Pat’s eyelids droop, “how does this work? Logistically.”

Pat lifts his hoof from Brian and wiggles the uh, different parts of it? Fingers? Brian doesn’t know fae deer anatomy. But he wiggles them like he’s replicating _it depends_, and it’s both bizarre and endearing as heck. “Magic,” is what he says though, and Brian’s eyes go into a big fucking eyeroll of their own accord.

“Oh my God.”

“Magic’s the actual answer,” Pat protests, and it’s hard to tell if he’s smiling like this, but Brian thinks he is, his lips turning up at the edges. “I could, uh, get you loose again,” and he just _says that_, like the words don’t sink beneath Brian’s skin and ignite his blood, “or you could, I don’t really have the hand dexterity.” Brian’s still stuck on the whole tongue thing. “Or there’s. There’s things I could do. To you.”

“I think we’d both agree there’s a boatload of things you could do to me, Pat,” Brian says, feeling both overwhelmed and kind of stupid, and then his brain overtakes his dick in what he’s capable of paying attention to. “Wait, like what? Magic fucky stuff?”

“By association… yes?”

“No, I mean — mindfucky stuff. Like, _oh, you won’t feel pain, it’s fine, there is no war in Ba Sing Se_ kind of stuff.”

Pat’s head tilts to the side like he’s trying to place the reference — which is a whole other thing Brian cannot concentrate on right now, because they can talk about what facets of pop culture Pat’s been exposed to (he plays Diablo III but doesn’t know what Avatar is!) or they can dick down, and Brian’s _committed_.

“It’d be physical,” Pat says eventually. “I’ve only ever used it on, uh, injured wildlife. When I need them to chill out so I can help them.”

“You’re offering to sedate me,” Brian says in what he hopes is a non-accusatory manner, because he’s still processing how he actually feels about that suggestion. Because for some reason! Like most of the shit he’s gone through in the last few days! It’s not an immediate _no thank you_!

Go skiing, they’d said. Get in touch with nature, they’d said. Realize you’re into the idea of nature getting real fucky with you, they had not said.

Pat actually bares his teeth, like he’s grimacing, and he does the _it depends_ hoof hand again. “Not… that makes it sound really fucking gross.”

“You use it on dead birds!”

“I use it on _injured wildlife_. It’s — relaxing. Makes you all warm and fuzzy and, uh.” He closes his mouth and sucks his bottom lip in, and Brian’s struck by how weird it’d be to try to bite your lip and not have teeth there to do it. Different habits for different bodies. “Fuck, okay, it’s like a sedative. Asshole.”

Brian laughs, a little higher pitched than he normally does, because yeah. Yeah, the idea of feeling… “There’s no, no emotional part to it, right? Just — relaxed.”

“It’s not like enthrallment,” Pat says firmly. “And I can stop it, whenever you want me to. If — if you want me to do it in the first place. Which you don’t have — there’s alternatives.”

God, this has been the weirdest 24 hours. Brian’s going to have a long look in the mirror when he gets home, and wonder how he’s made it to 25 without apparently ever tapping into all of _this_. And he’s — he’s with it, he knows people learn stuff about themselves all the time, but he didn’t think he was one of those people. Goddamn.

“Can we… try it out?” he offers, and as soon as the words have left his mouth Pat’s face is _close_, and it’s unsettling to stare down a snout at someone, but Pat’s eyes are locked onto him and unblinking. They’re so big, which — not really, not when compared to the rest of him, they make perfect sense, but when you just single out staring at them. Gosh, his pupils fill almost the whole of his dark irises, like he’s trying to capture as much of Brian as he can. Or like a predator, Brian’s mind helpfully supplies — like Zuko when he’s hunting flies.

Pat moves closer, nuzzles Brian’s cheek, and his breath is warm against Brian’s skin. “Tell me if you’re not a fan,” he says, and Brian feels that warmth spread, sink beneath fat and muscle and slide through his veins like — God, like anesthesia, a heavy weight settling in his limbs. But he’s aware, and Pat’s looking at him, and when Brian lifts his arm it weighs three hundred pounds, and Pat catches it and raises it to his mouth, draws his nose across Brian’s knuckles before licking him, his tongue threading between his fingers.

“Fuck me, this is weird,” Brian mumbles. He feels the slick warmth of Pat’s tongue but he knows if he wanted to do something in response, curl his fingers maybe, it’d take — years. Days, at least, to pull off the maneuver. And — gees, he’s not sure he can move his feet. They weigh so much heavier than his arm does.

Pat hums, placing his hand across his stomach. “Okay though?” 

“Yeah. Okay. I feel — it’s like I’m sinking into molasses.”

Pat hums again and noses at Brian’s shoulder, and then licks a slow stripe down his chest, his tongue dragging across one of his nipples and — oh. That’s unique. “Sounds sticky.”

“That’s the plan. I want you to have to hose me off after this,” Brian says, because he’s floppy and — truly, God, truly relaxed, but he’s also _determined_.

He’s staring up at the ceiling so he can only tell where Pat’s head is because the creaking of the bed is lower, because he feels the sharp breath of Pat’s laugh against his hip. Because he feels Pat’s tongue wend its way down the inside of one of his thighs, wrapping around — oh — his balls, before it’s gone again.

“How’re you feeling, magic-wise? Up for anything else?” Pat says, hot against Brian’s dick, and Brian forces his arm up. 

Forces his hand to rock in the air, and he laughs as he says, “It depends,” which he pulls off way better than Pat can even with his lazy limbs. And Pat seems to take that as some sort of agreement, because he nudges at Brian’s dick with, what, maybe his snout, solid and slightly cold, startling when juxtaposed with how _warm_ Brian feels. Startling but good. Shit, he’s hard.

Pat pushes against Brian’s hip, asks, “Can you turn over for me?” and Brian laughs again and — tries. When Brian was a kid they’d pile blankets up on his bed on top of him and see how long it took him to get out which... may have been older brother and sister bullying in hindsight, but which he’d thought it was fun. It’s like that: pushing against an outside force, until he breaks free enough to roll onto his side. Until Pat’s able to help him over the rest of the way.

Brian’s arms octopus out on either side of him and he sighs, turning his face so he's not smushing his nose against the mattress. Closes his eyes. “Pat, babe, can you bottle this. I want to use it when I'm keyed up."

"It's a Patrick exclusive," Pat says, and there's the chill of his nose against Brian's lower back and then the warmth of his tongue, lapping at him. "Let me," Pat asks, and Brian doesn't know what he's allowing but he wants it, to stay in this warm and safe cocoon of Pat's magic, to feel — worshipped like this, by a creature Brian is only on the edge of understanding.

"Yeah," he agrees, and Pat's tongue sinks into him, and he granted permission but Brian still feels claimed. Claimed and — oh, oh, he can't tense around him, can't find the strength to push back onto him. Pat opens him up, and there's warmth there too, and Pat's not trying to get him off like he was before, he's. He's opening Brian up, licking and pushing until Brian feels loose and filthy wet, and his hands are slowly spasming against the comforter, the most he can manage. He can't rock into the bed, can't find the exact muscle groups he needs to move his body to get pressure on his dick, and Pat's snout is pressed against his spread ass and his tongue is so fucking deep inside him.

"Let me," Pat says again, and Brian whimpers, tries to nod, and the bed creaks. An arm slips under Brian's waist and hefts him up onto his knees, and when it retreats he wobbles — and he laughs when it returns, gripped tight around him, an unbreakable hold.

"I'm not just letting you," Brian says hazily. His joints feel loose, his whole body a bag of soup, and Pat's grip — and the heat of him, hovering behind him — is grounding. "I want you to."

Pat hisses and Brian hears him shift on the bed, feels his chest brush against his back. Pat's nose messes his hair and Brian hangs forward, held up by Pat's steel grip, his arms doing nothing to support him where they're bent on the bed.

He feels — shit, Pat's legs brush against the backs of his thighs, and the blunt, wet head of Pat's dick slide up his leg, between his asscheeks. Catch on his hole. He’s, shit, he’s. He’s big, the head of his dick already larger than anyone, any_thing_ Brian’s had before.

"I want you to," he repeats, and Pat grunts, a low visceral hum that Brian feels in his bones.

"I want you to fuck me," Brian demands, and Pat rocks forward into him, driving Brian's hips into Pat's own grip.

Pat growls _fuck_ against the back of Brian's head, and Brian tries to think — anything. To think of words, to focus on anything but the stretch, the bright burst of pain followed by fullness. "Oh," he whimpers, and he finds the strength to lift an arm, to grasp at Pat's hoof on his hip, to hook his fingers around him, to feel another point of connection.

"You feel —" Pat says, and he stutters forward, deeper, oh, _God_, and the noise that leaks out of Brian's mouth is foreign to him, low and guttural and so eager. "Shit," Pat snarls, and Brian sucks his lower lip into his mouth and bites down, bites harder when Pat pulls out of him, the sound escaping him anyway, _desperate_.

"Is this, are you," Pat stutters, and he huffs against Brian's neck, then laves his skin in long, quick licks. "Tell me," he asks, and Brian's mind pushes through the fog of _overwhelmed_ to realize how easy it would be for Pat to command him. How he's not.

Brian can't push back on him, doesn't have the wherewithal to rock his hips, but he bends his head forward, that's too dang easy, and tells him, "It's, it's good, just, fuck me," and then when Pat's inching back into him, "and say my, say my name."

Pat shudders around him, within him, and moans something that's almost Brian's name, ending on a whine of _annn_, and Brian gasps when he feels Pat's hips against his ass, oh God, when he feels like he's been fucking — stuffed, and he wants, he wants, and Pat's other arm bends on the mattress near Brian's head and Pat's face is next to his, and Pat whines out _Brian_ before his tongue slides slick over Brian's cheek and pushes into Brian's mouth.

Brian's jaw is loose and Pat's tongue fills him, curls around itself and tickles at the back of his throat, and Brian starts to shake. He thinks he shouts when Pat thrusts into him again, muffled by Pat's tongue, but he can't be sure, he feels. He feels.

Pat's arm moves on his waist, moves Brian's hand with it, and maybe he's planning to touch Brian's aching dick but Brian moans when his hand slides across his stomach because. Because. Pat's deep within him, grinding his hips against Brian's ass like he's chasing sensation, and Brian can feel. Oh. And Pat realizes it too and holds Brian's hand there, lets him feel the heft of Pat's dick within him, distending his stomach, lets him feel it retract, lets him feel it bump against his palm when Pat thrusts forward again. Fucks his mouth and his ass and Brian can't speak but he thinks Pat's name, his true name, thinks morning dew and birdsong and Pat's growl shakes the both of them, and Pat keeps shaking, his hips jerking against Brian's ass, and he pushes Brian's hand flat against his stomach and his tongue unknots and glides out of Brian's messy mouth, and he noses at Brian's neck and whispers his name, again and again. Fucks into him in short bursts. Licks around his neck, his tongue like another hand, cradling Brian's jaw.

"Please," Brian mewls, "please," and Pat licks at his chin and mumbles his name and he goes taut around Brian, his arm tensing on Brian's stomach, and Brian feels his dick inside of him, flattens his palm and feels it as Pat comes, and Brian bites down on his tongue and needs. He needs. "Please, fuck, _please_."

Pat slowly, slowly pulls out of him, and Brian sobs with the loss, the sudden emptiness of it, how he no longer feels — smothered, held so irrevocably, and Pat manhandles him onto his back and licks down his chest, circling his nipples, across his stomach and lower. Brian jerks when Pat tongues at the head of his aching cock, and then shakes when Pat's tongue slides into his wet mess of a hole, he can feel — God, he can feel Pat's come leaking out of him, and then can hear the filthy sound of his tongue pushing it back in.

"Please," he whispers, unsure what he's asking for, still loose and lost and aching from need or something else, something darker, something like love, and a human-like hand, fingers, human fingers with human dexterity wrap around his dick and stroke him, solid, firm, and when he comes his mouth drops open and no sound comes out, and the only thing he can hear is his own breathing and then Pat's voice, rough, saying _Brian, Brian, Brian_.

==

Pat helps him into the shower.

"Hosed off," Brian mutters and then giggles, leaning into Pat's chest. He's still kind of wobbly. He feels — well and truly fucked out. He feels…

Pat kisses his neck, his shoulder. Angles them so he can turn the water on.

"How does it work?" Brian asks, slumped against Pat's chest, while Pat works shampoo into his hair. "How do you have plumbing out here? Is it magic?"

Pat laughs, and tips Brian's hair gently under the stream of water. "Yeah."

"I knew it," Brian sighs, and lets Pat maneuver him to lean against the shower tile, to hold onto the anti-slip rod screwed into the wall. He watches Pat drop to his knees and methodically, tenderly wash his legs. His feet. Between his knobbly toes. He turns when Pat prompts him and bites the inside of his cheek when Pat tenderly washes up the backs of his thighs, gently directs the water to wash him. When Pat kisses the small of his back.

He feels loved.

==

They lay curled around each other in Pat's bed, which has a new comforter. New sheets, probably. Brian's not sure how it didn't collapse, to be entirely honest, but he figures if Pat has strange magical powers the least he can do with them is use them to fortify furniture.

"I've barely eaten anything while I was here," Brian thinks aloud. Pat's playing with his hair, his long fingers slowly twisting and untwisting in it. It's the first time in a while Brian's sad it's not longer.

"Not a lot of food out here," Pat says, like that's an explanation. Maybe it is. Maybe a beetle in the trees generates electricity and the forest gives Pat enough food to survive, and Pat extends it, buffs it somehow. Leaves a simple meal of soup filling Brian for over a day.

Brian walks his fingers along Pat's collarbone, and then curls them against his chest. "I don't think I've drunk anything?'

"You haven't pissed, either," Pat says straight-faced, and when Brian glares at him, turns his head to the side to hide his laughter.

And then Pat jerks upright, every line of him taut, and Brian's heart stops in his chest. The warmth and safety of the moment fractures with Pat's frown.

"Pat," Brian starts, and Pat shakes his head once, abortively, and he lifts Brian's hand to his mouth and kisses his knuckles, just — stupidly romantic.

"Stay here," he orders, and he walks out of the bedroom and closes the door behind him, and Brian waits maybe… maybe thirty seconds before following him. Only to discover Pat's somehow locked it, and Brian swears under his breath and presses his ear to the door.

He can't hear anything at first, not even Pat moving around the cabin, and then he hears a voice that worms its way into his ears like a song, like a lilting melody, and he tries the doorknob again. It's — it's inviting. He thinks he knows the words. Why did Pat lock the door? It's familiar, and he could sing along if only the door would open —

And then he hears Pat shout something vicious, he hears Pat _angry_, hears Pat just on the other side of the door, hears his voice bend soft and warm and kind: "You can leave. You can go, sweetheart. You can go home."

And Brian wants to hear the song again but more than that he doesn't want to leave. He wants to feel — he wants to feel loved, cherished, he wants that comfort again, he wants Pat to cradle him, possessive, and he tries to tell him that but Pat's angry again, shouting at something else in the cabin. Not at Brian. He wouldn't shout at Brian.

"Sweetheart," Pat says again, and it's not the right name, and when Brian opens his mouth to correct him nothing comes out. Like he can't speak. Like something's stopping him. Like he can't say _Brian, call me Brian, please_. Like it's a bad idea to say that now. "Sweetheart, please, go," Pat says, and Brian hears something crack behind him, and when he turns there's a door behind the bed. An open door. A gust of wind blows a swirl of snow into the bedroom.

Brian's clothes, his glasses, his jacket and gloves and boots, are on the end of the bed. His phone is laid out on top, and when he grabs it it's fully charged again.

He keeps looking back at the door, straining to hear any bit of conversation, of _argument_, but he dresses all the same. Laces his boots and pulls his jacket on. Walks towards the door and feels — like it might be dangerous. To do that again.

He didn't recognize the song. He'd never heard it before. He can't think of the tune now.

He'd wanted Pat to call him by his name, he'd wanted to say it himself, so whoever was on the other side of the door would hear it. So they would know.

He sits down on the end of the bed. Or maybe his legs give out, who's to say.

He can't open the door. He can't — speak through it, Pat won't let him, won't let him be beguiled by, God, his father? And there's a door leading outside, and when Brian turns and looks again the snow has stopped and. And there's no way this is possible, but he can see the ski lodge through the trees. See the lights, the sloping architecture.

Pat's on the other side of the door and Brian can't say goodbye.

He staggers back up to his feet and stands in the doorway. The cold bites his nose, and he thinks about Laura, and Jonah. He thinks about his mom and his brother and his cat and his job, and he misses them all fiercely. Desperately. He hates snow. He's more inclined to like trees now than he was before. He's got a new respect slash loathing for the intelligence of crows.

He stops at the first tree — lays his palm flat against its trunk and leans in, his forehead resting against its bark. "I'm sorry," he whispers.

He tells the next tree, _I wish I could stay._

Another, _Thank you_.

He writes a fucking letter on his way to the ski lodge, and when he reaches the last tree before the clearing he breathes in shakily. Feels his eyes sting. "I think," he says, and the tree seems to sway towards him, its branches drawing in close, as though it knew it was being told a secret, "I think I. I could have loved it here," he says, and he trusts the tree to understand the breadth of that statement.

He breathes out slowly and feels — the loneliness of the woods. He forces himself forward, and when his boots crunch into the crisp snow at the edge of the clearing past the treeline, he feels hungry, and thirsty, and bone-deep exhausted, and when he hears someone yell his name in surprise, someone he doesn't recognize, he thinks _be careful with that _before he waves a hand and collapses to his knees.

==

“There aren’t enough trees in New York,” he tells Laura as they fly over the city, as he tries to pick out the parks. It’s a startling transition from upstate New York, let alone Maine.

Laura lays her head against his shoulder and clicks her tongue. “Please don’t go get lost in Central Park. Wear a GPS locator or something, okay?”

And he laughs, and he pushes down the ache in his chest, and he stows his tray table for landing.

==

They get to the luggage carousel while it's still stationary and Brian googles "Patrick Gill University of Maine". He gets a lot of results for a professor, a pleasant-looking woman who almost died in Siberia apparently, and nothing else. Pat didn't have a lot of extracurriculars. Just that picture of him and the woman in the cabin...

And Brian's an idiot, an absolute idiot that he didn't take any pictures — like his phone was useless without service. He played games and didn't think to take _pictures_. He didn't think to somehow memorialize Pat, take anything to remember him by. Fuck. _Fuck_, he could _cry_ —

Jonah nudges his shoulder. He looks worried, but like he's trying to hide it. "You okay?"

"I'm fine," Brian says, and his voice sounds like he's chewing on glass, and he shoves his phone into his coat pocket so he doesn't throw it across the terminal.

==

The first time he goes out is with Jenna, because she always jokingly invites the office to go camping with her. He's not sure if she's more surprised he took her up on the offer, or if he is.

It’s late spring and still cold in upstate New York, and there are patches of snow resolutely refusing to melt, circling the trees and hidden between brush. It’s — beautiful, and Brian forces himself out of bed at dawn, careful not to wake Jenna where she sleeps two feet away, her face smushed against her pillow.

He sits on a fallen log and... feels the morning, lets it wash over him. Tries to memorize the sensation of bitter cold. Of bright light. Of the first signs of wildlife, returning from southern climes.

He tries to listen to the trees, to feel the forest, but there’s nothing there for him. Only Pat’s name, in a different dialect.

He saves up and buys a pup tent and a good sleeping bag. A hiking backpack and all the paraphernalia. Jenna has recommendations which helps, and he comparison shops until he’s certain he’s getting a good deal. 

He goes inland. South. He goes to New Hampshire for a weekend and he ends up leaving early, throwing everything into the trunk of his car midway through the first night and driving until he finds a Motel 6 on the border of Massachusetts.

The woods felt… inhospitable. Like they knew him, and they didn’t want him there.

It’s the first time he’s _felt_ something, something real, and it woke him at 3AM and told him to leave.

He doesn’t think about it. He can’t.

When he visits his mom and step-dad in late August he finds an old tent in the garage and takes it out to the beach, Moose trotting beside him. He builds a fire and slumps in the sand and watches the ocean, and thinks about who must be in charge of the water. If they’d respect his wishes, or if they’d wrap their scaly hands in his hair and lash his limbs with seaweed and pull him down to the ocean floor. If they’d teach him to breathe in exchange for his servitude.

If they’d touch him and know he was already claimed, and spit him back onto the shore.

Or if they’d have heard the trees, if the gossip had gone south, carried by the wind and the birds, by a seagull that told them he was fucking persona non grata — if they’d just drown him on the spot.

When he wakes at dawn he walks into the night-chilled water in his bare feet and boxers. The water laps at his ankles and then his calves, and he stretches his arms out and feels the wind.

He whispers, “C’mon, you fuckers,” and the water strikes his knees in a sudden wave, the edges of his boxers getting wet. “C’mon!” But nothing pulls him down. Nothing pulls at him except for the normal rush of water.

“Communing with the sea?” his mom asks him when he comes back, sand trailing behind him.

“Yeah,” he says, trying not to drip on the kitchen linoleum. “It wasn’t really in the mood though.”

She gives him an indulgent smile and hums as she returns to her paper.

He ignores the ache at the center of his chest and goes to take a shower.

He ends up in Central Park a lot. There are smaller parks throughout the city, oases of green amidst the buildings, but the only place he can really feel lost in it is there — even with the people strolling by. He heads over after work a lot of times, and both Jonah and Laura are used to him coming home late, way later than he used to, because he's been "communing with the trees". Laura's joking when she says it. Mostly.

She suggested once, gently, that maybe he could talk to his therapist about what was on his mind. He thanked her for her suggestion, and did absolutely nothing of the sort.

One night an old woman joins him on his bench. It's not his — it's not anyone's actually, and he'd looked up how much it'd cost to adopt it, to make the city of New York put a plaque on a bench that read _Patrick Gill: I miss you, you hermit bastard. Every day_, and when he'd learned it was 10 fucking grand he'd quickly closed the tab so he didn't start contemplating what he'd need to do to make it happen.

But it's the bench he gravitates to more often than not, because it's got a good view of trees and it's a little off the beaten path, especially at this time of day, and usually no one sits next to him.

This old woman does. She's dressed in stylish black and sunglasses, and her hair is a shock of white contrasted against her clothing and her dark skin. She mutters something about tourists and Brian laughs, because God bless New Yorkers.

"You come here often?" she directs to him, and the last thing he wants to do right now is talk to a stranger while he miserably tries to connect to nature, but he's not gonna be rude.

He nods. "Yeah. It's nice."

She snorts, and when he glances at her, she's frowning. "New Hampshire wasn't a fan though, huh."

Goosebumps spring up along his arms and he looks at her full-on. He can't see her eyes, but when she turns to him he _feels_ them, like she's boring her gaze into his — and he knows there's something different. That if he could see them, he'd know for sure. "No," he says, and he clears his throat so he doesn't sound so shaky. "Didn't, uh, I didn't enjoy New Hampshire."

"They're all connected," she says obliquely, but she turns back to the trees and Brian digs his fingers into his thighs and resolutely _does not hope_. "The young one's been having a rough go of it, I think. The trees were angry when you visited."

The young one. Pat's barely older than Brian, he's —

"Absolute bitches, trees," she says, surprising a laugh out of him, and she shakes her head. "Think they're better than everyone else: better than the deep soul of a city, millions of people living and dying and fucking and praying day in and day out. There's a power in that too, but you'll never hear a tree cop to it."

"I don't hear them here," he says, and she snorts.

"You're lucky. I have to listen to them gossip and whine. It's taken a while — no good roots connecting these trees to the rest, but the birds have told them. Rats, couriers the lot of 'em."

"What've they said?" Brian could be dreaming. This conversation has that quality, gauzy at the edges. Smog maybe. Or magic. City magic — that must be a thing. This woman must be…

"He went native after that schooling," she says, and she laughs, and the sound is old and hard, and raises the hairs on the back of his neck. "I could bundle you up and keep you. You'd be happy. Here, there — wouldn't matter. You'd never have another worry in your life. I think that sounds freeing."

He should protest. Find the words to tell her she's wrong. But his lizard brain is firmly holding him back — it recognizes power.

"Every beating heart in this city is mine, whether they know it or not. Every breath you draw in is my responsibility, is my _gift_ to you. I enable it. I allow it. Those tree fuckers think they’re so special, managing root systems and knowing how wolverine guts work, when they don’t have any idea of the life in this place. The life that bleeds into the concrete. The life running through every bright flash in the pan human. And you…” She sighs. “I'm so tired of listening to the trees.” It'd be funny, if Brian weren't so… God, he is a little scared, isn't he. "I want to hear something different than the story of the pretty boy who revealed his name and still left," and Brian has enough time to think _that's me_ before she claps her hands together once. When she separates them a cord is stretching out between her palms, from_ inside_ her hands, and she's struggling with it, like she's actually pulling out a piece of herself —

And she turns and grabs his arm, looping the cord tight around his wrist, and he watches the ends of it seal together, and when it shifts on his skin it leaves, it. It leaves streaks of blood beneath, like she pulled out a strip of tendon, or. Or —

"You're looking pale." She laughs and Brian feels weak, a little, sways on the bench, and she pets his hair and he feels — really fucking patronized. "What's his name?"

"I'm," Brian says, and he swallows. He feels sick. "Pat."

"You're a dummy, huh," she says, and Brian frowns and feels — loose. Like he's spilling out of his body. Like he's a sack of melting jello.

"His name's," he says, and he remembers the feeling, the warmth and the light and how sacred it felt, how _precious_, and his edges break down completely.

==

He dry heaves into the leaves, his hands digging into the dirt. His organs feel like they've been reorganized. He's not sure his head's on straight.

His stomach eventually stops trying to escape through his esophagus and he sits back on his feet, head between his shoulders. He's not strong enough to lift it yet.

He's afraid of seeing where he is, anyway.

The cord is still around his wrist, and when he tries to untangle it, tear it off, it doesn't budge. It doesn't stretch, like leather would, and Brian's well on his way to a freakout about being tied to that city fae when the leaves in front of him crunch.

There's a crow. It's looking at him with its head tilted to one side, and Brian knows nothing about birds but he knows this crow.

"Timothy," he says, and doesn't add _you motherfucker_ but he feels like it's implied. "You're — where..." He looks around slowly, his head pounding, and. Oh. Oh, the trees.

It's only early fall, and the pines aren't affected but there are still deciduous trees sprinkled throughout the forest, still changing colors. And the pines are free of snowfall and vibrant green, and when Brian staggers to his feet and lays his palm flat against the bark of one he feels comforted. He feels sad, and lonely, and kind. He feels a deep love that overwhelms everything else.

When he looks back, Timothy's gone.

Brian leans against the tree and steadies his breathing, before sliding back down to the forest floor.

The trees know he's here. They're not mad at him anymore. He can wait until they talk to each other, until they've spread their message through the wood, until it reaches a small cabin with two rooms and the strange man who occupies it. He can wait. Timothy can get fucked. Timothy can go back to wherever he came from and shit in his own nest and sleep in it —

And then there's crashing from somewhere within the forest in front of him, and a great four-legged beast hurtles into the open, a crow flapping around its head, and Brian stumbles to his feet. Watches as Pat shifts, God, he's still wearing that plaid shirt, Brian isn't sure he owns anything else, and then Pat's stepping towards him on human legs and a human arm is reaching towards him, and Brian can't look away from his face, from the stark disbelief on his handsome face.

"Brian," he says, and there's power in the word, in Brian's name in Pat's mouth, and it's longing and desperately hopeful.

And Brian pushes away from the tree and launches himself at him, is caught up in Pat's arms, his solid grip, and Brian peppers his face with kisses and gosh, Pat's crying, isn't he, but Brian is too.

==

Pat swears nastily under his breath and finally slices through the cord on Brian's wrist with the knife he'd taken out of a lead box and held gingerly, like it hurt to do it. Before Brian can stand Pat then leans forward and licks at the blood left on Brian's wrist, and Brian struggles with concentrating on all the reasons — months apart, catching up, explaining what happened — they aren't in Pat's bed right now.

"Fucking — no one ever taught me to do this magic," Pat grouses, and Timothy chirps from his nest in the kitchen. "No, they would _not_ have told me if I'd just enthralled him," he grinds out, and Brian isn't so sure about that. The city fae seemed to think it was simple enough. She'd thought it was a great idea. Pat seems to be the only one who doesn't.

"Can you replicate it?" He rubs at his wrist once Pat's finished cleaning him. He doesn't know the differences between Pat and the city fae's magic, doesn't know if her obvious age and power would affect how it worked. If it worked at all. "Could I — if you gave me one, could I think of my sister and go back to her too? Like a transporter?"

Pat's frown melts into something — radiant. A smile like the sunrise on a crisp autumn morning.

And Brian grabs him by an antler and pulls him into a kiss.

**Author's Note:**

> HI THERE FRIENDS i hope you enjoyed!!! let me know if a comment if you're so inclined. i'd love to hear from you. ♥
> 
> a big ty to fiveyearmission for the absolutely fantastic beta and for the idea on how to stick the landing. she guaranteed a happy ending for this, everybody.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [quick bright things](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23849008) by [fishcola](https://archiveofourown.org/users/fishcola/pseuds/fishcola)


End file.
